2017-11-01
Author: Asimov's Science Fiction
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00

✮Fortieth✮

✮Anniversary Year✮

NOVELLA

170

I Met a Traveller
in an Antique Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Connie Willis NOVELETTES

16

The Discrete Charm of
the Turing Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Greg Egan 50

In Dublin, Fair City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rick Wilber 128

Nine Lattices of Sargasso . . . . . . . . . Jason Sanford SHORT STORIES

37

Confessions of a Con Girl . . . . . . . . . . Nick Wolven 70

The Last Dance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jack McDevitt 77

And No Torment

Shall Touch Them . . . . . . . . . . . James Patrick Kelly 88

Timewalking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael Cassutt 102

Skipped . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emily Taylor 108

Afloat Above a Floor of Stars . . . . . . . Tom Purdom

120

Love and Death and the Star that

Shall Not Be Named: Kom’s Story . . . James Gunn

152

Operators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joel Richards 162

The Nanny Bubble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Norman Spinrad

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017

Vol. 41 Nos. 11 & 12

(Whole Numbers 502 & 503)

Next Issue on Sale December 17, 2017

Cover Art for “I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land” by Eldar Zakirov POETRY

47

Apocatastasis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jennifer Crow 67

Your Clone Authors
a Sticky Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Robert Frazier 99

Change State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ken Poyner 105

Probabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . G. O. Clark 159

Nettle Coat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jane Yolen 167

How To Die on a Faraway Planet . . . . . . . H. Mellas 197

A Myth as Big as a Mile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jane Yolen DEPARTMENTS

4

Editorial: Excelsior! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sheila Williams 7

Reflections: Gog & Magog . . . . . . Robert Silverberg 10

On the Net: Time Party . . . . . . . . . . James Patrick Kelly 198

Next Issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

199

On Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peter Heck 208 The SF Conventional Calendar . . . Erwin S. Strauss Asimov’s Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 41, Nos. 11 & 12. Whole Nos. 502 & 503, November/December 2017. GST #R123293128.

Double issues published bimonthly by Penny Publications, LLC, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. One year subscription $47.94 in the United States and U.S. possessions. In all other countries $56.94 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. Address for subscription and all other correspondence about them, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. Allow 6 to 8 weeks for change of address. Address for all editorial matters: Asimov’s Science Fiction, 44 Wall Street, Suite 904, New York, N.Y. 10005. Asimov’s Science Fiction is the registered trademark of Penny Publications, LLC © 2017. All rights reserved. Protection secured under the Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions.

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Printed in by Trend Offset Printing, Jacksonville, FL U.S.A. (10/2/17)

EDITORIAL

Sheila Williams

EXCELSIOR!

simov’s fortieth anniversary year has
that have appeared during this anniver-
been filled with great fiction and a
sary year have been particularly reward-

Alot of fun. We were thrilled to receive ing. Our expanded format allowed for a tales from long-li t t l e e x p e r i -
time favorites who
lmer menting. Thus,
a
hadn’t appeared in
we were able to
our pages for a while
r u n a n e n t i r e

—like Connie Willis,
short novel by

Suzanne P

Karen Joy Fowler, R.

Kristine Kathryn

Garcia y Robertson,

R u s ch i n o u r
and Harry Turtle-

May/June issue

Photo by
dove—and to en-
and a series of
counter the works of
tales from James
new authors such as

Gunn’s Transcen-

Cadwell Turnbull,
d e n c e U n i v e r s e

Andrea M. Pawley,
along with many
and Emily Taylor.

other intriguing

We were also very
works by our tal-
pleased with the sto-
ented authors.

ries we published by Magazines on display at Housing Works Outside the
authors who appear
pages of the maga-
more regularly in the magazine. If I
zine, we had some small celebrations of
could, I’d name every single one of them
our anniversary along with a big bash in
here, but suffice it to say that the stories

April. For the glamorous awards banquet
ckie SherbowaJ

Photo by

Editors with visitors to the office. Left to Right: Emily Hockaday, Sheila Williams, Rick Wilber, Alexander Jablokov, Derek Künsken, and Nick Wolven

from Canada, Florida, Arizona, Mary-
kaday
land, and many places in between. We
had invited five Asimov’s authors to pre-

Hocy
sent excerpts from their work. Alexander

Jablokov, Sarah Pinsker, Cadwell Turn-

Emil
bull, and James Patrick Kelly all read
from stories that had appeared in the
magazine, while Suzanne Palmer read a

Photo by
piece from her exciting novel. While each
author spoke, a beautiful slideshow of
classic Asimov’s covers was projected
above their heads. The slideshow was de-
signed and produced by the magazine’s
associate editor, Emily Hockaday.

As the R.S.V.P.s returned in the days
before the party, we realized we’d be
hosting a lot of out-of-town authors. Emi-
ly and I decided to hold an all-day open
house at the Dell Magazines’ office the
day of the event. We had a bagel break-
fast with Timons Esaias and lunch with

Tochi Onyebuchi and Nick Wolven. In the
afternoon, the office overflowed when

Rick Wilber, Sarah Pinsker, James

Patrick Kelly, Alexander Jablokov, An-
drea M. Pawley, Derek Künsken, Rich

Cadwell Turnbull reads from his story

Larson, and Suzanne Palmer stopped by.

at the International Conference on the

In addition to these authors, we were

Fantastic in Florida in March, a copy of
our March/April anniversary issue was a
part of every diner’s place setting. Copies
of our anniversary year issues were also
distributed at the Nebulas in May, at the
ckie Sherbowa

Philadelphia Writers’ Conference in

J

June, as well as the Brooklyn and Balti-
more Book Festivals in September.

Our big event, though, was a Fortieth

Photo by

Anniversary celebration at New York

City’s Housing Works Bookstore Café.

Housing Works is a nonprofit organiza-
tion. In addition to the café, it operates
a chain of thrift stores and other entre-
preneurial businesses that raise funds
to combat homelessness and AIDs. The
bookstore café is in a beautiful old
building in the SoHo Cast Iron Historic

District. Shelves of books and twisting
balconies line the twenty-foot walls. We
were delighted to have the opportunity
to host our party on the Housing Work’s
premises.

The event was free and open to the
public. Over a hundred and fifty readers,
writers, and SF publishing professionals
attended. Readers and authors traveled

Suzanne Palmer reads from her novel

Raymond Carey

Photo by

The crew of presenters and Asimov’s editors at Housing Works. Left to Right: Cadwell Turnbull, Emily Hockaday, Suzanne Palmer, Sarah Pinsker, Alexander Jablokov, James Patrick Kelly, and Sheila Williams
pleased to see D. Mercurio Rivera, Robert
others coming up, we will have many

Thurston, Kit Reed, Leah Cypess, and
reasons to celebrate Asimov’s forty-first
others later that evening at the reading.

year as well! ❍

Although Leah
couldn’t make
kaday
it into the office
during the open

Hocy
h o u s e, s h e

Emil
dropped by a
couple of days
later, and we

Photo by
snapped a pho-
to of her stand-
ing in front of
o u r wa l l o f

Analogs, Asi-
mov’s, and Hugo

Awards.

I’m feeling a
bit wistful as
our fortieth an-
niversary year
draws to a close.

Yet, wonderful
projects and
stories loom on
the horizon.

With new tales
from writers
like Mary Robi-
nette Kowal,

Robert Reed,

Rich Larson,

R ay N ay l e r,

Paul Park, and

Leah Cypess and a wall of science fiction magazines and Hugos.

REFLECTIONS

Robert Silverberg

GOG AND MAGOG
n recent years some of you may have
imposed on a map of the United States,
watched a fairly popular television
the Great Wall would run from Philadel-
show called Game of Thrones, the plot
phia to Topeka, Kansas.

Iof which concerns a struggle for power The Great Wall of China, unlike the in the fictional continent of Westeros.

wall in Game of Thrones, was and is real.

One conspicuous feature of the land-

But there was a version of the Great
scape of Game of Thrones is a colossal

Wall that belonged to the realm of fanta-
wall of solid ice, three hundred miles
sy: the mighty wall that Alexander the
long and seven hundred feet high, built

Great supposedly built somewhere in
thousands of years earlier than the time
the far northern reaches of Asia to ward
of the story to prevent an assortment of
off the invasion of the dreaded inhabi-
dangerous marauders—“wildlings,” zom-
tants of the unknown north, and espe-
bies, the mysterious White Walkers, and
cially the mysterious tribes known to
various other creatures—from descend-

Europeans as Gog and Magog. It is here,
ing out of the north and attacking the
in the tale of Alexander’s wall, that his-
civilized inhabitants of the Seven King-
tory and fantasy converge, with Ch’in
doms of Westeros.

Shih Huang Ti’s real world shading into

Westeros, its Seven Kingdoms, the
the imaginary one of Game of Thrones.

great wall of ice, and the various hostile

Gog and Magog are Biblical names. In
life-forms penned up behind that wall, all

Ezekiel we are told, “Son of man, set thy
spring from the fertile imagination of
face toward Gog, of the land of Magog,

George R.R. Martin, who has created the
the prince of Rosh, Mechech, and Tubal,”

huge series of fantasy novels that gave
and we hear a grim prophecy: “Thou
rise to the television show that has capti-

[Gog] shalt come from thy place out of
vated so many millions of viewers. The
the uttermost parts of the north, thou
wall that runs north of the Seven King-
and many peoples with thee, all of them
doms may be a work of fantasy, but it had
riding upon horses, a great company and
a prototype in the actual history of our
a mighty army. . . . Surely in that day
world—the Great Wall of China, which
there shall be a great shaking in the

Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, the first emperor of
land of Israel.” And in the New Testa-

China, began building in 221 B.C. to pro-
ment we read in Revelations a prediction
tect his realm against invasion by bar-
that Gog and Magog will burst forth
baric tribes of the north. The Great Wall,
upon us in the end times: “And when the
parts of which still exist, traced a zigzag
thousand years are finished, Satan shall
line for nearly 2,500 miles across China,
be loosed out of his prison and shall
one twentieth of the circumference of the
come forth to deceive the nations which
entire world, and the material it once
are in the four corners of the Earth, Gog
contained would have been sufficient to
and Magog, to gather them together in
form a barrier eight feet high and three
the war, the number of which is as the
feet thick that completely encircled the
sand of the sea. . . .”

globe at the Equator. In 1790 a member

It is unlikely that the author of Revela-
of the British embassy to the Chinese
tions knew anything about Ch’in Shi
court calculated that the Great Wall con-

Huang Ti and his Great Wall, and Ezekiel
tained more brick and stone than all the
lived four hundred years before that wall
buildings of the United Kingdom. Super-
was built. Which northern barbarians it

Reflections: Gog and Magog

7

November/December 2017
was that he feared we will never know;
breadth eight cubits. And he made a lower
perhaps they were the Cimmerians, who
threshold from mountain to mountain, the
invaded the Near East about a century
length of which was twelve cubits, and he
before Ezekiel’s time, or the Scythians,
hammered it into the rocks of the moun-
who came a few decades later. But there
tains, and it was fixed in with brass and
certainly were menacing barbarians in
iron.” Having done this, Alexander causes
the north, and they were a constant men-
an inscription to be engraved on the gate,
ace to the urban settlements beyond. Ear-
to the effect that at the end of eight hun-
ly in the Christian era the Huns came out
dred and twenty-six years the Huns
of Central Asia, were deflected by the
would break forth and “make the earth

Great Wall, kept going westward into
tremble,” and at the conclusion of nine

Russia, and eventually tumbled down
hundred and forty years “the world shall
upon the Roman world, wreaking havoc
come to an end by the command of God.”

everywhere. A particularly terrifying Hun

The real Alexander never built any
invasion in 395 saw the barbarian tribes
walls in the Caucasus, but in the sev-
breaking out of the Caucasus to ravage
enth century the legend that he had
the Byzantine Empire, the eastern half of
done so found its way into the Koran,
the sundered Roman world. It must have
where Alexander is known by the Arabic
seemed then as if the prophecies of
name of Dhu’l-Qarneyn, “the two-horned

Ezekiel had come true, and that Gog and
one,” a reference growing out of a differ-

Magog were loosed upon the world.

ent legend. The section of the Koran

This linked up with an entirely differ-
known as “the Cave” describes Dhu’l-
ent set of legends concerning Alexander

Qarneyn as arriving at a place between
the Great, in which he was purported to
two mountains where the villagers tell
have built a mighty wall between two
him that the tribes of Gog and Magog
mountains in the Caucasus to keep back
come periodically to extract tribute from
barbarians. A Syrian tale about the myth-
them, and ask him to build a wall to hold
ical exploits of Alexander dating from 514
them back. Which he does, fashioning it
depicts him encountering a native of the
out of iron and copper, “and Gog and Ma-
region and saying, “Who are the nations
gog were not able to surmount it, nor
within this mountain upon which we are
could they pierce it.”

looking?”

Perhaps the earliest tales of Alexan-

“They are the Huns.”

der’s wall may have represented some

“And who are their kings?”

sort of displacement of awareness of Chi-

“Gog and Magog and Nawal the kings
na’s Great Wall, rumors of which very
of the sons of Japhet,” he is told.

likely had reached the western world

Turning now to his troops, Alexander
somewhere along the way, but the Cau-
asks, “Do you desire that we should do
casus is very far indeed from northern
something wonderful in this land?” And

China. In fact there was a real wall in
the legend continues:

the Caucasus at the time the Koran was

“They said to him, ‘As thy majesty com-
written, and there was no reason to as-
mands, we will do.’ The king said, ‘Let us
cribe it to Alexander, because it had been
make a gate of brass and close up this
built by the Persian King Anushirvan,
breach.’ His troops said, ‘As his majesty
during whose reign Mohammed had
commands, that we will do.’ And Alexan-
been born. Anushirvan’s wall was at
der commanded and fetched three thou-

Derbend, on the western shore of the
sand smiths, workers in iron, and three

Caspian. It was built around 542, and
thousand men, workers in brass. And
was generally known as the Iron Gate.

they put down brass and iron, and knead-

No one in the area had any reason to
ed it as a man kneads when he works clay.

think that the Iron Gate of Derbend was

Then they brought it and made a gate, the
the work of Alexander, who had lived
length of which was twelve cubits and its
eight centuries earlier. But myths and

8

Robert Silverberg

Asimov’s
reality blurred into each other readily
place where the Alexander Book relates
enough back then, and in Europe the
that he shut in the Tartars between two

Iron Gate of Derbend and the mythical
mountains. In fact they were not Tar-
wall of Alexander against Gog and Ma-
tars, but people called Comanians and
gog eventually were merged in a collec-
various other races, because there were
tion of tales known as the Alexander
no Tartars at that time.”

Book, so that the wall in the Caucasus

Marco also managed to add his mea-
became “the Iron Gate of Alexander.”

sure of confusion to the Gog and Magog

Early European explorers, knowing
story when he spoke of Mongolia: “This is
nothing of Anushirvan, thought of it that
the place which we call in our language
way—for example, the thirteenth-centu-

Gog and Magog; the natives call it Ung
ry monk William of Rubruck, who ven-
and Mungul. Each of these two provinces
tured deep into the Mongol Empire that
was inhabited by a separate race; in Ung

Genghis Khan had founded, and wrote of
lived the Gog, in Mongol the Tartars. . . .”

“Porta Ferrea, or the Iron Gate, now

The Islamic world, too, went on won-
called Derbend, which Alexander built to
dering about Gog and Magog for cen-
exclude the barbarous nations out of
turies. They knew very well, of course,

Persia.” The great Venetian traveler
who had really built the wall at Derbend,

Marco Polo, visiting China a few years
and that Alexander the Great had had
later, said nothing about the Great Wall
nothing to do with it. But there was that
in his narrative of his journey, though he
troublesome tale in the Koran of D’hul-
certainly must have seen some part of it,

Qarneyn and the wall he had built to hold
but he did offer the standard garbled ac-
back Gog and Magog to deal with, too,
count of Alexander’s supposed wall when
and, inevitably, Moslem rulers during the
describing his own passage through the
early great years of Islamic rule sent

Caucasus on his way east: “I should let

Arab explorers to discover that wall. They
you know that Alexander had a tower
found a wall, all right, and Gog and Ma-
and fortress built here, so that the na-
gog as well, or at least said they did. I’ll
tives could not sally out to attack him.

try to untangle that complicated story

This was called the Iron Gates. It is the
next time. ❍

Reflections: Gog and Magog

9

On the Net

James Patrick Kelly

TIME PARTY
party

“Chronology protection conjecture”

n June 28, 2009, the celebrated

< thelifeofpsi.com/wp-content/uploads/
physicist and cosmologist Stephen

2014/09/Hawking-1992.pdf> that time

Hawking threw a party < youtube.

travel into the past was impossible. “It

O com/watch?v=elah3i_WiFI>. It was a seems,” he wrote then, “that there is a catered affair, complete with champagne

Chronology Protection Agency which
and hors d’oeuvres. Hawking was meticu-
prevents the appearance of closed time-
lous in creating his invitations, giving not
like curves and so makes the universe
only the address of the hall at Cambridge
safe for historians.” On the other hand, if

University, but its exact coordinates in
someone from the future had shown up,
hyperspace. He distributed these invita-
think of the hot stock tips he could have
tions throughout the world; over the
passed along!

years they’ve become something of a col-

The apparent scarcity of tourists from
lectors’ item. You can find them on the in-
the year 802,701 is reminiscent of the
ternet, and for £39.00 you can own an au-

Fermi Paradox < seti.org/seti-institute/
thorized reproduction < kiteprint.com/
project/details/fermi-paradox>, which
collections/frontpage/products/stephen-
observes a similar scarcity of alien astro-
hawkings-time-travellers-invitation-open
nauts from TRAPPIST-1e < en.wikipedia

-edition>. Despite all his efforts, however,

.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1e> and the myri-

Hawking failed utterly as a host. “I sat
ad other Goldilocks worlds < national
there a long time,” he reports, “no one
geographic.com/astrobiology/goldilocks
came.”

-worlds/> in our universe. Where the hell

Perhaps this was because Hawking
is everybody?

didn’t send invitations out until after

Is the chronology protection conjecture
the party took place. Or perhaps it was
right? I’m just an English major and
because the guests he invited didn’t ex-
can’t begin to explain the prediction that
ist. You see, the invites read, “You are
radiation feedback would almost cer-
cordially invited to a reception for Time
tainly collapse any wormhole a time

Travelers. Hosted by Stephen Hawking.”

traveler could conjure up in order to zip

Anyone who thinks that Hawking
into the past. But since a gap—to put it
doesn’t have a sense of humor just hasn’t
mildly—exists at present in our under-
been paying attention. But when Hawk-
standing of wormhole engineering,
ing documented this party in his televi-
might there not be other explanations
sion series < dailymotion.com/video/
for why Hawking got no takers?

x1lvfi0_into-the-universe-time-travel_tv>,
it was not only as a jape but also as an
no time
experiment. He did all that he could to

One is that time travel might be possi-
ensure that his invitations would last a
ble, but it’s way too hard to accomplish.

long, long time in the hope that someone

Special relativity < www.einstein-online.

in the (perhaps distant) future who had
info/elementary/specialRT> tells us
mastered time travel would jump at the
that any subluminal particle with mass
chance for a convivial glass or two with
would need infinite energy to accelerate
him in the twenty-first century. It was a
to the speed of light. So, galactic empires?

win-win proposition for Hawking, who

No way! Except various workarounds in-
famously declared in his 1992 paper
volving space warps have been proposed,
notably the Alcubierre Drive < en.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive> and

®
traversable wormholes < space.com/

27845-interstellar-movie-wormhole-travel

-feasibility.html>. And if we could break
the speed limit of the universe, that
might also give us access to time travel.

SHEILA WILLIAMS

Editor

However, warping spacetime will require

EMILY HOCKADAY
a tsunami of new science and the har-

Associate Editor
nessing of energy sources that we are

DEANNA MCLAFFERTY
most likely centuries, if not millennia,

Editorial Assistant
from achieving.

JAYNE KEISER

Returning for a moment to the Fermi

Typesetting Director

Paradox, let’s consider some of the vari-

SUZANNE LEMKE
ables in the famous Drake Equation

Assistant Typesetting Manager

< seti.org/drakeequation>, which weighs

KEVIN DORIS
the probability that there might be aliens

Senior Typesetting Coordinator
out there capable of contacting us. The

VICTORIA GREEN
last three variables in the Drake Equa-

Senior Art Director
tion are f , the fraction of planets on which
i

CINDY TIBERI
intelligent life emerges; f , the fraction of

Production Artist
c
these civilizations that develop technolo-

JENNIFER RUTH
gy capable of sending signals; and L, how

Production Manager
long those civilizations last. While we are

ABIGAIL BROWNING

Manager Subsidiary Rights and Marketing
an instance of f in the Drake Equation,
c
in that we have been sending radio sig-

CAROL DEMONT

Licensing/Digital Sales Manager
nals to the stars since 1906 < quora.

com/How-far-has-the-first-radio-signal-

SANDY MARLOWE

Circulation Services
data-transmission-to-space-traveled-to-

ADVERTISING SALES DEPARTMENT
date>, we are not yet counted in the f of c
printadvertising@dellmagazines.com
what I’ll call the Hawking Equation,

(Display and Classified Advertising)

which might estimate how likely time

Subscriber Services: 203-866-6688 Option #2
travel is to be developed—if it is possible.

PETER KANTER

And what is our L in either equation? Will

Publisher
our fragile civilization survive long enough

BRUCE W. SHERBOW
to leap all the daunting technological hur-

Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing
dles? Maybe our descendants will never

CHRISTINE BEGLEY
get the chance to develop time travel?

Vice President, Editorial and Product Development

Another explanation is that perhaps the

SUSAN MANGAN
time machine can only go back in time to

Vice President, Design and Production
the point where it was switched on. Since

ISAAC ASIMOV

Editorial Director (1977-1992)

one hasn’t been invented yet, much less
activated, 2009 (and for that matter 2017)

Stories from Asimov’s have won 53 Hugos and 28
was not accessible from the future. But if

Nebula Awards, and our editors have received 20
at some point a working time machine

Hugo Awards for Best Editor.

was turned on, it would create a closed

Please do not send us your manuscript until you’ve
gotten a copy of our guidelines. Look for them
timelike curve (CTC) < scientificameric
online at www.asimovs.com or send us a self-
an.com/article/time-travel-simulation-
addressed, stamped business-size (#10) envelope,
resolves-grandfather-paradox/>. The CTC
and a note requesting this information. Write “man-
uscript guidelines” in the bottom left-hand corner
would loop from the coordinates of its
of the outside envelope. We prefer electronic sub-
startup through other spacetime coordi-
missions, but the address for manual submissions
nates in the future and then back to the
and for all editorial correspondence is Asimov’s

Science Fiction, 44 Wall Street, Suite 904, New York, original coordinates. But no further back!

NY 10005-2352. While we’re always looking for

Still another explanation is that future
new writers, please, in the interest of time-saving,
generations may be too responsible to use
find out what we’re looking for, and how to pre-
pare it, before submitting your story.

November/December 2017
time travel technology, since they’ll have
able to return to ours, the universe of
read the countless—if somewhat quaint
their origin. Thus whatever mischief they

—science fiction stories from our era
wreak and whatever wrongs they right
warning of the paradoxes that arise from
would have no impact on us.

travel to the past. For an excellent brief

We Asimov’s readers know all about
look at such hoary tropes as the Grand-
the long tradition of flipping historical
father Paradox < timetravelphilosophy.

turning points into alternate histories.

net/topics/grandfather>, the Bootstrap

For “What if the Nazis had won WWII?”

Paradox < astronomytrek.com/the-boot-
see The Man in the High Castle < en.

strap-paradox-explained>, the Meet
wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_

Yourself Paradox < timetravelphiloso-

High_Castle> by Philip K. Dick < philip phy. net/topics/double> and others,
kdickfans.com> or for “What if the Span-
check out 5 Bizarre Paradoxes of
ish Armada had defeated the English?”

Time Travel Explained < astrono-
see Ruled Britannia < en.wikipedia.org/
mytrek.com /5-bizarre-paradoxes-of-
wiki/Ruled_Britannia> by Harry Tur-
time-travel-explained>. For a more com-
tledove < sfsite.com/~silverag/turtledove prehensive and logic-twisting survey, try

.html>. For some time these tales have
the excellent Time Travel Philosophy
occupied contested ground in the genre.

< timetravelphilosophy.net> website.

Are they fantasy or science fiction? Crit-

As a side note, a fannish reading of
ics still disagree.

Stephen Hawking’s passing mention of a

In a ground-breaking doctoral thesis

“Chronology Protection Agency” in his
published in 1957, physicist Hugh

1992 paper suggests that he was familiar

Everett III < en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
with at least some of SF’s Time Police

Hugh_Everett_III> showed (among other
subgenre < sf-encyclopedia.com/entry
things!) how these alternate histories

/time_police> in which responsible citi-
might actually be SF. His proposed inter-
zens from the future patrol the time
pretation of quantum mechanics was at
lines to prevent evildoers from changing
odds with accepted theory at the time, the
history. Indeed, no less an authority

Copenhagen interpretation < plato.

than SFWA Grandmaster Frederik
stanford.edu/entries/qm-copenhagen>

Pohl < thewaythefutureblogs.com> as-championed by Neils Bohr < nobel
serts that Hawking has always been an
prize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates

SF fan. “Stephen Hawking said he spent

/1922/bohr-bio.html>. To understand the
most of his first couple of years at Cam-
disagreement, recall the famous Schrö -
bridge reading science fiction (and I be-
dinger’s Cat thought experiment < you
lieve that, because his grades weren’t all
tube.com/watch?v=OkVpMAbNOAo>. It
that great).” And did you know that
was designed so that, due to a proba-

Hawking and his daughter Lucy have
bilistic quantum process, a vial of
written a science fiction series for young
cyanide might or might not be smashed,
readers, beginning with George’s Secret
thus poisoning a cat sealed with the vial

Key to the Universe < en.wikipedia.

in a box. The equations tell us that
org/wiki/George’s_Secret_Key_to_the_
something must happen, but that there’s

Universe>?

no way to know what until someone

One final explanation for why Hawk-
opens the box and looks. Bohr’s Copen-
ing failed to attract any guests might be
hagen interpretation says that the cat
that we inhabit the original timeline that
exists in a state of superposition, that it
existed before time travel was invented.

is at once alive and dead until someone

Suppose that whenever time travelers
opens the box and by observing collaps-
switch on their devices and traipse off
es the quantum wave function, settling
into the past or the future, they remove
the cat’s fate. Everett’s take is that the
themselves to a different timeline in a
microscale quantum event that deter-
parallel universe and are therefore un-
mines whether the vial is smashed or

12

James Patrick Kelly

Asimov’s
not happens at the mac roscale as well.

ture, alas. The arguments against it,

Two universes diverge from the defining
while fun to explore and well-suited for
moment; one in which the cat is alive
storifying by up-and-coming SF writers,
and one in which the cat is dead.

do not pass the Occam’s Razor <y ou

Everett’s mind-boggling idea is known
tube.com/watch?v=skcCu4RUkAg> test.

today as the Many Worlds Interpreta-

So sorry, no time travel into the past for
tion < youtube.com/watch? v=dzK-
the likes of us!

Wfw68M5U>. While originally dismissed

Time travel into the future, on the oth-
with scorn, it has garnered more and
er hand. . . .

more adherents, although majority opin-

Meanwhile, if it’s any consolation,
ion among physicists still lies elsewhere.

Hawking was not the first to come up

If you don’t mind losing your grip on re-
with the tongue-in-cheek idea of a
ality, click over to io9 < io9.gizmodo.

“Chronology Protection Agency . . . which
com/the-9-weirdest-implications-of-the-
makes history safe for historians.” As
many-worlds-interpre-1692618056>, for

James Gleick < around.com> points out an exploration of what the many worlds
in Time Travel < nytimes.com/2016/10/
interpretation might mean to you per-

02/books/review/james-gleick-time-travel
sonally.

.html?_r=0>, the book that was in part

But for our purposes, the Many Worlds
the inspiration for this and my previous

Interpretation offers an explanation of
column:

how all time travelers would have to

Ray Bradbury, for example, stated
pass out of our universe, never to return.

it in his 1952 story about time-trav-

This would leave our world as the pris-
eling dinosaur hunters: ‘Time does-
tine one in which time travel does work,
n’t permit that sort of mess—a man
but in which it appears not to.

meeting himself. When such occa-

For an amusing video recap of these
sions threaten, Time steps aside.

explanations of why our most famous cos-

Like an airplane hitting an air pock-
mologist was stood up by the future, click
et.’ Notice that time has agency
over to Stephen Hawking Invites You
here; time doesn’t permit and time

To His Time Travel Party < journal
steps aside.

ofthingsblog.wordpress.com/2017/02/17

Hey, if you haven’t read Ray Brad-

/stephenhawking>. In fact, let me recom-
bury’s < raybradbury.com> “A Sound of mend the entire Journal of Things

Thunder” < en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Blog < journalofthingsblog.wordpress.

A_Sound_of_Thunder> go find a copy to
com> “a weekly essay series on topics
cheer yourself up. One of the best time
ranging from films, politics to science and
travel yarns ever!

spirituality” created by Sudharsanan

And on a personal note, I was reminded

Sampathkumar < sudharsanansampath
when I went to save this file that my first

.com>. His concise and clever videos cov-

“On The Net,” entitled “Experiment,” ap-
er a range of topics of interest to readers
peared in the August 1998 issue of this
of this column.

magazine. I’m proud, if a little bemused,
to report that this is my one hundredth
exit
column. Thank you, dear readers, for

I’m afraid I have to agree with Stephen
your attention and support over the

Hawking’s chronology protection conjec-
years! ❍

On the Net: Time Party

13

THE

DISCRETE

CHARM

OF THE TURING

MACHINE

Greg Egan

Greg Egan has published more than sixty short stories and thirteen novels. His novella “Oceanic” ( Asimov’s, August 1998) won a Hugo award. His last appearance in Asimov’s was “The Four Thousand, The Eight Hundred” (December 2015), and his latest novel, Dichronauts, was published in July by Night Shade Books. Greg’s new tale takes a look at the impact of automation on a young family.

1

“What is it, exactly, that you’re threatening to do to me?” The client squinted down at his phone, looking more bemused and weary than belligerent, as if he’d been bad-gered and harassed by so many people that the only thing bothering him about this call was the time it was taking to reach the part where he was given an ultimatum.

“This is absolutely not a threat, Mr. Pavlos.” Dan glanced at the out-stream and saw that the software was exaggerating all the cues for openness in his demeanor—
less a cheat than a workaround for the fact that his face was being rendered at about the size of a matchbox. “If you don’t take up our offer, we won’t be involved in any way with the recovery of your debt. We think it would be to your benefit if you let us step in and help, but if you don’t want us to intervene, we won’t become your creditors at all. We will only buy your debt if you ask us to.”

The client was silent for a moment. “So . . . you’d pay off all the people I owe money to?”

“Yes. If that’s what you want.”

“And then I’ll owe it all to you, instead?”

“You will,” Dan agreed. “But if that happens, we’ll do two things for you. The first 14

Asimov’s
is, we will halve the debt. We won’t ever press you for the full amount. The other thing is, we’ll work with you on f inancial advice and a payment plan that satisf ies both of us. If we can’t f ind an arrangement you’re happy with, then we won’t proceed, and we’ll be out of your life.”

The client rubbed one eye with his free thumb. “So I only pay half the money, in instalments that I get to choose for myself ?” He sounded a tad skeptical.

“Within reason,” Dan stressed. “If you hold out for a dollar a week, that’s not going to f ly.”

“So where do you make your cut?”

“We buy the debt cheaply, in bulk,” Dan replied. “I’m not even going to tell you how cheaply, because that’s commercial-in-conf idence, but I promise you we can make a prof it while still getting only half.”

“It sounds like a scam,” the client said warily.

“Take the contract to a community legal center,” Dan suggested. “Take as long as you like checking it out. Our offer has no time limit; the only ticking clock is whether someone nastier and greedier buys the debt before we do.”

The client shifted his hard hat and rubbed sweat from his forehead. Someone in the distance called out to him impatiently. “I know I’ve caught you on your meal break,”

Dan said. “There’s no rush to decide anything, but can I email you the documents?”

“All right,” the client conceded.

“Thanks for giving me your time, Mr. Pavlos. Good luck with everything.”

“Okay.”

Dan waited for the client to break the connection, even though his next call was already ringing. Give me a chance to let them believe I’ll still remember their name five seconds from now, he pleaded.

The in-stream window went black, and for a moment Dan saw his own face reflected in the glass—complete with headset, eyes puffy from hay fever, and the weird pink rash on his forehead that had appeared two days earlier. The out-stream still resembled him pretty closely—the filter was set to everyman, not movie star—but nobody should have to look at that rash.

The new client picked up. “Good morning,” Dan began cheerfully. “Is that Ms. Lom-bardi?”

“Yes.” Someone had definitely opted for movie star, but Dan kept any hint of knowing amusement from his face; his own filter was as likely to exaggerate that as conceal it.

“I’d like to talk to you about your financial situation. I think I might have some good news for you.”

When Dan came back from his break, the computer sensed his presence and woke. He’d barely put on his headset when a window opened and a woman he’d never seen before addressed him in a briskly pleasant tone.

“Good afternoon, Dan.”

“Good afternoon.”

“I’m calling you on behalf of Human Resources. I need to ask you to empty your cubicle. Make sure you take everything now, because once you’ve left the f loor, you won’t have an opportunity to return.”

Dan hesitated, trying to decide if the call could be a prank. But there was a pad-lock icon next to the address, ruth_bayer@HR.thriftocracy.com, which implied an authenticated connection.

“I’ve been over-target every week this quarter!” he protested.

“And your bonuses have ref lected that,” Ms. Bayer replied smoothly. “We’re grateful for your service, Dan, but you’ll understand that as circumstances change, we need to f ine-tune our assets to maintain an optimal f it.”

The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine

15

November/December 2017

Before he could reply, she delivered a parting smile and terminated the connection. And before he could call back, all the application windows on his screen closed, and the system logged him out.

Dan sat motionless for ten or f ifteen seconds, but then sheer habit snapped him out of it: if the screen was blank, it was time to leave. He pulled his gym bag out from under the desk, unzipped it, and slid the three framed photos in next to his towel. The company could keep his plants, or throw them out; he didn’t care. As he walked down the aisle between the cubicles, he kept his eyes f ixed on the carpet; his colleagues were busy, and he didn’t want to embarrass them with the task of f inding the right words to mark his departure in the twenty or thirty seconds they could spare before they’d be docked. He felt his face flushing, recalling the time a year or so ago when a man he’d barely known had left in tears. Dan had rolled his eyes and thought: What did you expect? A farewell party? An engraved fountain pen?

As he waited for the elevator, he contemplated taking a trip to the seventh f loor to demand an explanation. It made no sense to let him go when his KPIs weren’t just solid, they’d been trending upward. There must have been a mistake.

The doors opened and he stepped into the elevator. “Seven,” he grunted.

“Ground f loor,” the elevator replied.

“Seven,” Dan repeated emphatically.

The doors closed, and the elevator descended.

When it reached the lobby, he stepped out, then quickly stepped back in. “Seventh f loor,” he requested breezily, hoping that a change of tone and body language might be enough to fool it.

The doors remained open. He waited, as if he could wear the thing down by sheer persistence, or shame it into changing its mind, the way Janice could melt a nightclub bouncer’s stony heart with one quiver of her bottom lip. But if his access was revoked, it was revoked; magical thinking wouldn’t bring it back.

He raised his face to the button-sized security camera on the ceiling and silent-ly mouthed a long string of expletives, making sure not to repeat himself; if it ended up in some YouTube compilation he didn’t want to look lame. Then he walked out of the elevator, across the lobby, and out of the building without looking back.

The job hadn’t been the worst he’d done, but after four years he was due for a change. Screw Thriftocracy; he’d have something better by the end of the week.

2

Dan looked around at the group of parents gathered beside him at the school gate, mentally sorting them into three categories: those whose work hours happened to accommodate the pick-up, those who’d willingly chosen a life of domestic duties, and those who seemed worried that someone might ask them why they weren’t in a place of business at three o’clock on a weekday afternoon.

“First time?” The speaker was a man with a boyish face and a fast-receding hair-line. Dan had picked him for a category two, but on second glance he was less sure.

“Is it that obvious?”

The man smiled, a little puzzled. “I just meant I hadn’t seen you here before.” He offered his hand. “I’m Graham.”

“Dan.”

“Mine are in years two and f ive. Catherine and Elliot.”

“Mine’s in year three,” Dan replied. “So I guess she won’t know them.” That was a relief; Graham put out a definite needy vibe, and being the parent of one of his children’s friends could well have made Dan the target for an extended conversation.

16

Greg Egan

Asimov’s

“Although I’ve been a science fiction reader for close to fifty years, it wasn’t until the late 1980s, when Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine was nearly ten years old, that I stumbled on a copy in a bookshop in Sydney and realized that it was publishing the best short work in the field. And while its contributors included writers I had known since childhood, it also had fantastic new authors who came as a revelation to me. I first encountered Michael Swanwick, Lucius Shepard, Pat Cadigan, James Patrick Kelly, Tom Purdom, and Maureen McHugh in these pages.

“As an aspiring writer, it seemed unlikely to me that I’d ever join their ranks, but to my amazement and delight (after a few rejections) my story “The Caress” was accepted, and appeared in Asimov’s first issue of the 1990s. In the decade that followed, Gardner Dozois published more than a dozen of my stories, and I have no doubt that this played a large part in the fact that I had a career as a writer at all.

“So, my congratulations to Asimov’s on reaching its fortieth year! May it continue to thrive, and to bring new readers and writers together for decades to come.”

—Greg Egan

“So you’re on holiday?”

“Between jobs,” Dan admitted.

“Me too,” Graham replied. “It’s been two years now.”

Dan frowned sympathetically. “What line of work are you in?”

“I was a forensic accountant.”

“I’m in f inancial services, but more the sales end,” Dan explained. “I don’t even know why they turfed me out; I thought I was doing well.” As the words emerged, they sounded far more bitter than he’d intended.

Graham took hold of Dan’s forearm, as if they were old friends and Dan’s mother had just died. “I know what that’s like, believe me. But the only way to survive is to stick together. You should join our group!”

Dan hesitated, unsure what that might entail. He wasn’t so proud as to turn down the chance of car-pooling for the school pick-ups, and he’d happily weed a community garden if it put a dent in the grocery bill.

“We meet on Wednesday afternoons,” Graham explained, “for book club, f ight club, carpentry, and scrapbooking, and once a month, we go out into the desert to interrogate our masculinity.”

“Does that include water-boarding?” Dan wondered. Graham stared back at him uncomprehendingly.

“Daddy, look at this!” Carlie shouted, running toward him so fast that Dan was afraid she was going to fall f lat on her face. He broke free of Graham and held up his hands toward her like a crossing guard facing a runaway truck.

“Slow down, gorgeous, I’m not going anywhere.”

She ran into his arms, and he lofted her up into the air. As he lowered her, she brought one hand around and showed him the sheet of paper she’d been clutching.

“Oh, that’s beautiful!” he said, postponing more specif ic praise until he knew exactly who was meant to be portrayed here.

“It’s my new teacher, Ms. Snowball!”

Dan examined the drawing more carefully as they walked toward the car. It looked like a woman with a rabbit’s head.

“This is nice, but you shouldn’t say it’s your teacher.”

“But it is,” Carlie replied.

“Don’t you think Ms. Jameson will be hurt if you draw her like this?”

“Ms. Jameson’s gone,” Carlie explained impatiently. “Ms. Clay sits at her desk, but she’s not my teacher. Ms. Snowball’s my teacher. I chose her.”

“Okay.” Dan was starting to remember a conversation he’d had with Janice The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine

17

November/December 2017
months before. There was a trial being rolled out at the school, with iPads and educational avatars. The information sheet for the parents had made it sound laudably one-to-one, tailored to each individual student’s needs, but somehow he’d never quite imagined it involving his daughter being tutored by the creature from Donnie Darko.

“So Ms. Snowball’s on your iPad?” he checked.

“Of course.”

“But where has Ms. Jameson gone?”

Carlie shrugged.

“I thought you liked her.” Dan unlocked the car and opened the front passenger door.

“I did.” Carlie seemed to suffer a twinge of divided loyalties. “But Ms. Snowball’s fun, and she’s always got time to help me.”

“All right. So what does Ms. Clay do?”

“She sits at her desk.”

“She still teaches most of the lessons, right?”

Carlie didn’t reply, but she frowned, as if she feared that her answer might carry the same kind of risk as confessing to a magic power to transform the carrots in her lunchbox into chocolate bars.

“I’m just asking,” Dan said gently. “I wasn’t in the classroom, was I? So I don’t know.”

“Ms. Clay has her own iPad,” Carlie said. “She watches that. When we go to recess and lunch she stands up and smiles and talks to us, but the other times she just uses her iPad. I think she’s watching something sad.”

“It is only a trial,” Janice said, examining the document on her phone. “At the end of two terms, they’ll assess the results and notify the, er, stakeholders.”

“Are we stakeholders?” Dan asked. “Do you think being a parent of one of their students nudges us over the line?”

Janice put the phone down on the dining table. “What do you want to do? It’s too late to object, and we don’t want to pull her out of that school.”

“No, of course not!” He leaned over and kissed her, hoping to smooth away her worried expression. “I wish they’d made things clearer from the start, but a few months with Mrs. Flopsy’s not the end of the world.”

Janice opened her mouth to correct him on the name, but then she realized he was being facetious. “I’d never picked you as a Beatrix Potter fan.”

“You have no idea what my men’s group gets up to.”

3

Dan woke suddenly, and squinted at the bedside clock. It was just after three A.M. He kept himself still; Janice would have to get up in less than an hour, with her shift at the hospital starting at f ive, so if he woke her now she’d never fall back to sleep.

She only had the extra shifts while a colleague was on maternity leave; at the end of the month she’d be back to her old hours. If he didn’t f ind work by then, they had enough in their savings account to pay the mortgage for at most another month. And while his old employer could work their magic on smaller sums, they weren’t going to offer his family a chance to keep this house at half price.

Where had he gone wrong? He could never have been a doctor or an engineer, but the last plumber he’d hired had charged more for half an hour’s work than Dan had ever earned in a day. He didn’t see how he could afford any kind of retraining now, though, even if they accepted thirty-f ive-year-old business school graduates who’d earned a C in high school metalwork.

18

Greg Egan

Asimov’s

When Janice rose, Dan pretended he was still asleep, and waited for her to leave the house. Then he climbed out of bed, turned on his laptop, and logged in to the JobSeekers site. He would have received an email if there’d been any offers, but he read through his résumé for the hundredth time, trying to decide if there was anything he could do to embellish it that would broaden his appeal. Inserting the right management jargon into his descriptions of his duties in past positions had done wonders before, but the dialect of the bullshit merchants mutated so rapidly that it was hard to keep up.

As he gazed despondently at the already ugly prose, an advertisement in the margin caught his eye. HAVE YOU BEEN SKILL-CLONED? it asked. JOIN OUR INTERNATIONAL CLASS ACTION, AND YOU COULD BE IN LINE FOR A SIX-FIGURE PAYOUT!

His anti-virus software raised no red flags for the link, so he clicked through to a page on the site of an American law f irm, Baker and Saunders. DISMISSED FROM A JOB THAT YOU WERE DOING WELL? he read. YOUR EMPLOYER MIGHT HAVE USED LEGALLY

DUBIOUS SOFTWARE TO COPY YOUR SKILLS, ALLOWING THEIR COMPUTERS TO TAKE OVER AND

PERFORM THE SAME TASKS WITHOUT PAYMENT!

How hard would it have been for the software that had peered over his shoulder for the last four years to capture the essence of his interactions with his clients? To learn how to gauge their mood and tailor a response that soothed their qualms?

Handling those ten-minute conversations was probably far easier than keeping an eight-year-old focused on their lessons for hours at a time.

Dan read through the full pitch, then opened another browser window and did a search to see if there were any local law firms mounting a similar case; if he did this at all, it might be better to join an action in an Australian court. But there was nothing, and the American case seemed focused as much on the skill-cloning software’s Seattle-based vendor, Deepity Systems, as the various companies around the world that had deployed it.

He had no proof that Thriftocracy had duped him into training an unpaid succes-sor, but the lawyers had set up a comprehensive online questionnaire, the answers to which would allow them, eventually, to determine if he was eligible to be included in the class action. Dan wasn’t sure if they were hoping to get a court order forcing Deepity to disclose its list of clients, but their pitch made it sound as if the greater the enrollment of potential litigants at this early stage, the stronger their position would be as they sought information to advance the case. And it would cost him nothing to join; it was all being done on a no win, no fee basis.

He glanced at the clock at the top of the screen. Carlie would be awake in half an hour. He clicked on the link to the questionnaire and started ticking boxes.

After he’d driven Carlie to school, Dan sat in the living room, back at his laptop, hunting for crumbs. The last time he’d been unemployed he’d managed to make fifty or sixty dollars a week, mostly by assembling flat-pack furniture for the time-poor.

But TaskRabbit was offering him nothing, even when he set his rate barely above what he’d need to cover transport costs. As far as he could tell, all the lawn-mowing and window-washing now went either to national franchises that advertised heavily to build their brand awareness but would cost tens of thousands of dollars to join, or to desperate people who were willing to accept a few dollars an hour, and lived close enough to where the jobs were that their fuel costs didn’t quite bring their earnings down to zero.

He was starting to feel foolish for signing up to the class action; even in the most optimistic scenario, it was hard to imagine anything would come of it in less than three or four years. And however angry he was at the thought that he might have been cheated out of the dividends of his meager skill set, he needed to put any fantasies of a payout aside and focus his energy on finding a new way to stand on his own feet.

The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine

19

November/December 2017

Glaring at the laptop was getting him nowhere. He set about cleaning the house, sweeping and mopping all the tiled f loors and vacuuming the carpeted ones, waiting for inspiration to strike. He’d already looked into off ice cleaning, but the bulk of it was automated; if he borrowed against the house to buy half a dozen Room-bas on steroids and bid for a contract at the going rate, he might just be able to earn enough to pay the interest on the loan, while personally doing all the f inicky tasks the robots couldn’t manage.

Between loads of laundry he dusted cupboard-tops and bookshelves, and when he’d hung out the clothes to dry he spent half an hour on his knees, weeding. He could dig up the lawn and f ill the entire backyard with vegetables, but unless the crop included Cannabis sativa and Papaver somniferum, it wouldn’t make enough of a difference to help with the mortgage.

He still had an hour to kill before he picked up Carlie. He took down all the curtains and hand-washed them, recalling how angry Janice had been the time he’d carelessly thrown them into the machine. When he was done, he thought about washing the windows, but doing it properly would take at least a couple of hours.

And he needed to leave something for tomorrow.

On his way to the school, he spotted someone standing on the side of the road ahead, dressed in a full-body dog’s costume—white with black spots, like a Dalmatian. The street was purely residential, and the dog wasn’t holding up any kind of sign, touting for a local business; as Dan drew nearer, he saw a bucket and squeegee on the ground. The costume was matted and filthy, as if the occupant had been wearing it—or maybe sleeping in it—for a couple of weeks.

Dan slowed to a halt. The dog nodded goofily and ran out in front of the car, wiping the windscreen with crude, urgent strokes, even though there was no other traffic in sight. Dan wound down his side window and then reached into his wallet. He only had a five and a twenty; he handed over the twenty. The dog did an elaborate pan-tomime bow as it backed away.

When he pulled into the paking lot in the shopping strip beside the school, he sat cursing his stupidity. He’d just thrown away a fifth of the week’s food budget—but the more he resented it, the more ashamed he felt. He still had a partner with a job, a roof over his head, and clean clothes that he could wear to an interview. He ought to be fucking grateful.

4

“Do you need a hand there?”

Dan straightened up as he turned toward the speaker, almost banging his head into the hood. Graham was standing beside the car, with his kids a few steps behind him, playing with their phones.

“I think it’s a f lat battery,” Dan said. He’d stopped paying for roadside assistance two weeks before; his trips were so short it hadn’t seemed worth it.

“No problem,” Graham replied cheerfully. “Mine’s nothing but battery. I’ll bring it around.”

The family walked away, then returned in a spotless powder-blue Tesla that looked like it had been driven straight from the showroom. Carlie just stood and stared in wonderment.

Graham got out of the car, carrying a set of leads.

“Are you sure that’s . . . compatible?” Dan could live with his own engine not starting, but if the Tesla blew up and fried Graham’s kids, he’d never forgive himself.

“I installed an adapter.” Graham played with the ends of the cables as if they 20

Greg Egan

Asimov’s
were drumsticks. “I promise you, your spark plugs won’t even know they’re not talking to lead and acid.”

“Thank you.”

As soon as Dan turned the key in the ignition, the engine came to life. He left it running and got out of the car while Graham disconnected the leads.

“I was about to ask Carlie to try to start it while I pushed,” Dan joked, closing the hood.

Graham nodded thoughtfully. “That might actually be legal, so long as she kept it in neutral.”

Dan glanced at the Tesla. “You must be doing all right.”

“I guess so,” Graham conceded.

“So you’re working now?” Just because he wasn’t keeping normal off ice hours didn’t mean he couldn’t have some lucrative consulting job.

Graham said, “Freelancing.”

“I did a unit of forensic accounting myself, f ifteen years ago. Do you think I’d be in the running if I went back for a refresher course?” Dan felt a pang of shame, asking this man he barely knew, and didn’t much like, for advice on how he could compete with him. But surely the planet still needed more than one person with the same skills?

“It’s not accounting,” Graham replied. He looked around to see who was in earshot, but all the children were engrossed in their devices. “I’m writing bespoke erotic f iction.”

Dan rested a hand on the hood, willing the heat from the engine to aid him in keeping a straight face.

“You write porn. And it pays?”

“I have a patron.”

“You mean a Patreon? People subscribe . . . ?”

“No, just one customer,” Graham corrected him. “The deal is, I write a new book every month, meeting certain specif ications. The fee is f ive grand. And since my wife’s still working, that’s plenty.”

Dan was leaning on the car for support to stay vertical now. “You’re kidding me,” he said. “You email one person a Word f ile, and they hand over f ive thousand dollars?”

“No, no, no!” Graham was amused at Dan’s obvious unworldliness. “The book has to be printed and bound, in a deluxe edition. One copy, with a wax seal. And there are other expenses too, like the ice-cream cake.”

Dan opened his mouth but couldn’t quite form the question.

“I 3D-print a scene from the book in ice cream, to go on top of the cake,” Graham explained.

“And then what? You hand-deliver it? You’ve met the customer?”

“No, it’s picked up by a courier. I don’t even have the delivery address.” Graham shrugged, as if that aspect were the strangest part of the arrangement. “But I can respect their desire for privacy.”

Dan couldn’t help himself. “What was the last book about? Or is that confidential?”

“Not at all. I get to release them as free e-books, a month after the print edition.

The last one was called Citizen Cane. Two plucky Singaporean teenagers start a protest against corporal punishment that snowballs into a worldwide movement that overthrows repressive governments everywhere.”

“How is that . . . ?” Dan trailed off and raised his hands, withdrawing the question.

Graham f inished rolling up the leads. “And how are you and Janice doing?”

“We’re f ine,” Dan said. “Just when I thought we were going to lose the house, she got some extra hours at the hospital. So, yeah, we’re absolutely f ine.”

The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine

21

November/December 2017

5

“Can you leave your phone in the car?” Janice asked, as they pulled into the driveway of her brother’s house.

“Why?”

“Callum’s got this thing about . . . how intrusive they are, when people are so-cializing.”

Dan could sympathize, but he’d had no intention of live-tweeting the dinner.

“What if the sitter calls?”

“I’ve got mine, set on vibrate.”

“How will you feel it vibrate if it’s in your bag?” She’d dressed up for their f irst night out in an eternity, and Dan was fairly sure she had no pockets.

“It’s strapped under my arm,” Janice replied.

Dan chortled. “You’re just messing with me. I’m taking mine in.”

Janice raised her arm and let him feel. She’d anchored it to her bra somehow.

Dan was impressed; it didn’t show at all. “If we ever need to turn informant, you’re the one who’ll be wearing the wire.”

Lidia greeted them at the door. As she kissed Dan’s cheek, her f ixed smile looked forced and hollow, as if she were trying to tell him there were dangerous men inside pointing guns at her husband’s head. Dan almost asked her what was wrong, but she moved on to Janice, conjuring up something to laugh about, and he decided it had just been a trick of the light.

As they sat down in the living room, Dan noticed that the TV was gone, along with the old sound system. But a turntable was playing something on vinyl, and though Dan didn’t recognize the artist he was fairly sure it wasn’t from the age before CDs.

“I see you’ve gone retro chic,” he joked.

Lidia made an awkward gesture with her hands, dismissing the comment while imbuing it with vastly more importance than Dan had intended. “Let me check what’s happening in the kitchen,” she said.

Dan turned to Janice. “What’s up with her?” he whispered. “Has something happened?” He knew that Callum had lost his job in a chain-store pharmacy, but that had been eight or nine months ago.

Janice said, “If they want to tell you, they’ll tell you.”

“Fair enough.” No doubt Lidia and Callum had been looking forward to a chance to forget their woes for one evening, and he should have known better than reminding her, however inadvertently, that they’d been forced to sell a few things.

Callum ducked in brief ly to greet them, looking f lustered, then apologized and retreated, muttering about not wanting something to boil over. It took Dan several seconds before the oddness of the remark registered; he’d been in their kitchen, and the hotplates—just like his and Janice’s—had all had sensors that precluded anything boiling over. If you tried to sell a second-hand electric stove, would you really get enough to buy an older model and have anything left over to make the transaction worthwhile?

When they sat down in the dining room and started the meal, Dan smiled politely at all the small talk, but he couldn’t help feeling resentful. Both couples were struggling, and he’d kept nothing back from Callum and Lidia. What was the point of having friends and family if you couldn’t commiserate with them?

“So have you started cooking meth yet?” he asked Callum.

Janice snorted derisively. “You’re showing your age!”

“What?” Dan could have sworn he’d seen a headline about an ice epidemic somewhere, just weeks ago.

22

Greg Egan

Asimov’s

Callum said, “There’s a micro-fluidic device the size of a postage stamp that costs a hundred bucks and can synthesize at least three billion different molecules. Making it cook meth just amounts to loading the right software and dribbling in a few in-gredients that have far too many legitimate purposes to ban, or even monitor.”

Dan blinked and tried to salvage some pride. “What’s a postage stamp?”

As the meal progressed, Callum began emptying and refilling his own wine glass at an ever brisker pace. Dan had pleaded driving duty, but the truth was he’d decided to give up booze completely; it was a luxury he didn’t need, and it would be easier if he didn’t make exceptions. He watched his host with guilty fascination, wondering if a state of mild inebriation would allow him to confess the problem that he’d told his sister to keep quiet about.

“We’ll make great pets,” Callum said, apropos of nothing, nodding his head in time to music only he could hear. Dan glanced at Lidia, wondering if she was going to beg him not to start singing, but her expression was more psycho-killer in the basement than husband about to do drunk karaoke.

Dan said, “What is it no one’s telling me? Has someone got cancer?”

Callum started laughing. “I wish! I could get my chemo from licking the back of a postage stamp.”

“What, then?”

Callum hesitated. “Come with me,” he decided.

Lidia said, “Don’t.” But she was addressing Callum, not Dan, so he felt no obliga-tion to comply.

Callum led Dan into his study. There were a lot of books and papers, but no laptop and no tablet.

“It’s happened,” he said. “The AIs have taken over.”

“Umm, I know that,” Dan replied. “I think I lost my job to one.”

“You don’t understand. They’ve all joined hands and merged into a super-intelligent . . .”

Dan said, “You think we’re living in the Terminator? ”

“ ‘I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream,’ ” Callum corrected him tetchily.

“Whatever.” Dan looked around. “So you’ve thrown out everything digital to make it harder for our AI overlords to spy on you?”

“Yes.”

“And why exactly have we come into this particular room?” Unless he knew about Janice’s bra-phone, the dining room was every bit as low-tech as this one.

“To show you the proof.”

Callum unlocked a filing cabinet and took out a laminated sheet of paper. Apparently it predated the great technology purge: it was a printout of a web page, complete with URL at the top. Dan bit his lip; his brother-in-law, with a master’s degree in pharmacology, believed SkyNet had risen because the internet told him?

Callum offered the page to Dan for closer inspection. It contained a few lines of mathematics: first stating that x was equal to some horrendously large integer, then that y was equal to another, similarly huge number, and finally that a complicated formula that mentioned x and y, as well as several Greek letters that Dan had no context to interpret, yielded . . . a third large number.

“Did a computer somewhere do arithmetic? I think that’s been known to happen before.”

“Not like this,” Callum insisted. “If you check it, the answer is correct.”

“I’ll take your word for that. But again, so what?”

“Translate the result into text, interpreting it as sixteen-bit Unicode. It says: ‘I am the eschaton, come to rule over you.’ ”

“That’s very clever, but when my uncle was in high school in the seventies he swapped The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine

23

November/December 2017
the punched cards in the computing club so the printout came back from the university mainframe spelling SHIT in giant letters that filled the page. And even I could do the calculator trick where you turn the result upside down and it spells ‘boobies.’ ”

Callum pointed to the third line on the sheet. “That formula is a one-way function.

It ought to take longer than the age of the Universe for any computer in the world to find the x and y that yield a particular output. Checking the result is easy; I’ve done it with pen and paper in two weeks. But working backward from the message you want to deliver ought to be impossible, even with a quantum computer.”

Dan pondered this. “Says who?”

“It’s a well-known result. Any half-decent mathematician will conf irm what I’m saying.”

“So why hasn’t this made the news? Oh, sorry . . . the global super-mind is censor-ing anyone who tries to speak out about it. Which makes me wonder why it confessed to its own existence in the first place.”

“It’s gloating,” Callum declared. “It’s mocking us with its transcendent party tricks, rubbing our faces in our utter powerlessness and insignificance.”

Dan suspected that Callum had drunk a little too much to process any argument about the social and biological reasons that humans mocked and gloated, and the immense unlikelihood that a self-made AI would share them.

“Any half-decent mathematician?” he mused.

“Absolutely.”

“Then let me make a copy of this, and show it to one.”

Callum was alarmed. “You can’t go on the net about this!”

“I won’t. I’ll do it in person.”

Callum scowled in silence, as if trying to think of a fresh objection. “So how are you going to copy it? I’m not letting you bring your phone into the house.”

Dan sat down at the desk and picked up a pen and a sheet of blank paper. The task was tedious, but not impossible. When he was finished, he read through the copy, holding the original close by, until, by the third reading, he was sure that it was flawless.

Dan was pleasantly surprised to f ind that in the foyer of the Mathematics Department there was a chipped corkboard covered with staff photos. Not every source of information had moved solely to the web. He picked a middle-aged woman whose research interests were described as belonging to number theory, noted the courses she was teaching, committed her face to memory, found a physical timetable on another notice board, then went and sat on the lawn outside the lecture theater. True to his word to Callum, he’d left his phone at home. He began by passing the time people-watching, but everyone who strode by looked so anxious that it began to unsettle him, so he raised his eyes to the clouds instead.

After f ifteen minutes, the students f iled out, followed shortly afterward by his target.

“Dr. Lowe? Excuse me, can you spare a minute?”

She smiled at f irst, no doubt assuming that Dan was a mature-age student who had some legitimate business with her, but as she started reading the sheet he’d given her, she groaned and pushed it back into his hands.

“Oh, enough with that garbage, please!”

Dan said, “That’s what I hoped you’d say. But I need to convince someone who thinks it’s legitimate.”

Dr. Lowe eyed him warily, but as he sketched his predicament—taking care not to identify Callum—her face took on an expression of glum sympathy.

“I’m all in favor of trolling the transhumanists,” she said, “but there comes a point where it’s just cruel.”

24

Greg Egan

Asimov’s

“So what’s the story here?” Dan pressed her, gesturing at the magic formula.

“Until about a year ago, it did seem highly likely that this was a one-way function. But then there was a paper by a group in Delhi proving a nice result in a related subject—which incidentally meant that this function was eff iciently invertible. If you pick the output that you want to produce, you can actually find an x and y in quadratic time.”

“Quadratic time?”

“It’s not impractical; an ordinary desktop computer could do it overnight. Someone sat down and wrote a twenty-line program to generate this result, then posted it on the net as a joke. But you’d think everyone would have heard of the Delhi group’s result by now.”

“My friend doesn’t go on the net any more.” Dan couldn’t really explain why Callum hadn’t done some due diligence before adopting that policy, but they were where they were; the question was what to do about it.

“So it would be just as easy to cook up a new x and y that gave the output ‘Relax, you were trolled’?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And when my friend claims he can verify the calculations with pen and paper, is that actually possible?”

“If he really has that much time on his hands.”

Dan braced himself. “How hard would it be for you to . . . ?”

“Encode the antidote for you?” Dr. Lowe sighed. Dan wished he had his Thriftocracy f ilter between them to boost his sincerity metrics and maybe add just a hint of puppy-dog eyes.

“I suppose it’s a public duty,” she decided. “In fact, post it on the net, will you? I don’t want to post it myself, because it’s sure to attract a swarm of crackpots and I’ve got better things to do than deal with them.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll email it to you in a couple of days,” she said. “Or if that’s forbidden, drop by and you can pick it up in person.”

6

“I need to do this,” Janice said, nervously spinning her phone around on the table. The promotional clip she’d showed Dan was still playing, with a smiling nurse helping an elderly patient across a hospital room, while a “colleague” that looked like it had transformed from some kind of elliptical trainer held the patient’s other arm.

“I agree,” he said. “No question. I’ll join the picket line myself.”

She winced. “You can start by not calling it a picket line. We need to make some noise, but this isn’t a blockade.”

“Okay. Can I help you egg the Minister’s house afterward?”

“That’s more like it.”

It was almost midnight; Janice had just come back from her late shift. Dan felt his stomach tightening; the union would pay her something from the strike fund, but it wouldn’t be enough to cover the mortgage. And he had nothing to show for four months of job-hunting.

“Have you heard from Callum?” she asked.

“Give it time,” Dan replied. “I suspect he’s double-checking everything.”

“If this works, you’ll be Lidia’s hero for life.”

Dan grunted unappreciatively. “And the opposite to Callum.”

The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine

25

November/December 2017

“Why? Once he gets over the embarrassment, he ought to be grateful that you punctured his delusion.”

“Did you ever see The Iceman Cometh? ”

Janice said, “I’m too tired to remember, let alone work out what point you’re trying to make.”

“Yeah. We should go to bed.”

Dan lay awake, trying to think of reasons to be optimistic. Maybe the strike would only last a couple of days. Nobody cared whether the sleazebags who cold-called them from boiler rooms were human or not, but however many adorable robot seals the hospitals put in their children’s wards, the public wouldn’t stand by and let half their nurses be replaced by props from Z-grade science fiction movies.

The Minister rose to address the legislative assembly. “We need to be agile and innovative in our approach to the provision of health care,” she said. “The public expects value for money, and this illegal strike is just a desperate, cynical attempt by special interest groups to resist the inevitable.”

Everyone in the crowd of protesters was gathered around half a dozen phones, standing on tiptoes and peering over people’s shoulders instead of each watching on their own. It was awkward, but it made for an oddly communal experience.

“The independent research commissioned by my department,” the Minister continued, “demonstrates conclusively that not only will we be saving money by rolling out the Care Assistants, we will be saving lives. We will open more beds. We will slash the waiting times for surgery. And we will speed up the throughput in the Emergency Departments. But the unions are intent on feathering their own nests; they have no interest in the public good.”

The jeering from the opposition benches was subdued; that from the nurses around him less so. Dan had read the report the Minister was citing; it was packed with dubious suppositions. There had certainly not been any peer-reviewed trials establishing any of these vaunted claims.

“Get over yourselves and get back to work!” a man in a wheelchair shouted, as he powered his way toward the sliding doors at the hospital’s main entrance. The nurses were maintaining a skeleton staff to ensure that no patients were put at risk, but there was no doubt that people had been inconvenienced—and the CareBots were still far from able to plug all the gaps.

Dan glanced at his watch. “I have to pick up Carlie,” he told Janice.

“Yeah. See you tonight.” Her voice was hoarse; she’d been here since six in the morning, and the chants weren’t gentle on anyone’s throat.

Dan squeezed her hand as they parted, then made his way slowly through the throng toward the parking lot.

Before he could unlock the car, his phone chimed. He glanced at it; he had a message from the bank. He’d applied for a temporary variation on their loan agreement: a two-month period of interest-only payments. They’d turned him down.

The strike wasn’t going to end in the next few days. He sent a message to Janice.

YOU SAW THAT FROM THE BANK? I THINK WE NEED TO MOVE NOW, OR THEY’LL DO IT FOR

US AND SCREW US IN THE PROCESS.

He stood by the car, waiting, feeling the blood rising to his face. What good was he to her and their daughter? He’d forced her into a position where she’d had to work every day until she could barely stand up, and now they were still going to lose the house. He should have got down on his knees and begged Graham to find him his own wealthy pervert to titillate. At least he’d never aspired to be any kind of writer, so debasing the practice wouldn’t make him a whore.

The reply came back: OKAY, DO IT.

26

Greg Egan

Asimov’s

Dan covered his eyes with his forearm for a few seconds, then got control of himself. He had the listing prepared already; he opened the real estate app on his phone and tapped the button that made it go live.

Then he got into the car and headed for the school, rehearsing his speech to Carlie about the amazing new home they’d be living in, with stairwells covered in multi-colored writing and a balcony so high up that you could see everything for miles.

7

“I was played,” Callum said angrily. He was sitting on the last of the packing crates, drenched with sweat, after helping Dan lug it up eight f lights to the Beautiful Place.

Dan was still struggling to catch his breath. His gym membership had expired a month ago, and apparently his cardiovascular system had mistaken the sudden decline in demand for an excuse to go into early retirement.

“You don’t know CPR, do you?”

“You’ll be f ine.” Callum cycled, rain or shine, rich or poor, right through the Singularity. “I know you think I was an idiot, but it’s not that simple.”

Dan sat on the f loor and put his head on his knees. “Please don’t tell me that it was all a double bluff: our AI masters pretended to reveal themselves, then allowed you to discover that they really hadn’t, in order to convince you that they don’t exist. Of all the even-numbered bluffs, the less-famous ‘zero bluff ’ cancels itself out just as thoroughly, while attracting even less attention.”

But Callum was in no mood to see his faith mocked, and if his Shroud of Turin had failed its carbon dating, that demanded a conspiracy at least as elaborate as his original, theological claims.

“It’s not as if I took that Reddit post at face value,” he said vehemently. “I checked the Wikipedia article on one-way functions before I did anything else. And I swear, the formula was still listed as a high-conf idence candidate. There was even a link to some famous complexity theorist saying he’d run naked across a f ield at MIT if it was ever disproved in his lifetime.”

“Maybe he’d already seen an early draft of the paper; it’s so hard to f ind good excuses for compulsive exhibitionism.”

“Last week, I went back to Wikipedia and looked at the edit history. That part of the article was actually updated to take account of the Delhi result, months before I read the page.”

“But then some vandal rolled it back?”

“No. Or at least, if that’s what happened, the edit history doesn’t ref lect it.”

Dan’s breathing had slowed now; he raised his head. “Okay. So the trolls didn’t just edit the article, they had the skills to cover their tracks. That’s sneaky, but—”

“ ‘Sneaky’ isn’t the word for it! I’ve been comparing notes with people online, and either the article was edited thousands of times in the space of a couple of days—all without raising any flags with Wikipedia—or the edit history is actually correct, but certain people were fed the older version, somehow.”

Dan gazed across the f loor at all the crates he needed to unpack before Janice arrived with Carlie. “Someone messed with your head, and you’re angry. I get it.

But that doesn’t mean you have a personal cyber-stalker, who knew exactly when you’d taken the bait and jumped in to prop up all the other pieces of fake scenery as you walked by each one of them.”

Callum was silent for a while. Then he said, “The thing is, when we thought it The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine

27

November/December 2017
was real, we weren’t doing too badly. We were keeping things together: f ixing each other’s stuff, doing food runs out into the countryside.”

“Practicing your Linda Hamilton chin-ups, learning to f ire rocket launchers . . .”

Callum laughed, but then caught himself. “I can think of a few countries where it might have ended up like that.”

Dan said, “So look on the bright side.”

“Which is?”

“You can still play Terminator: Resistance for as long as you like, repairing your analog gadgets and running a clandestine food co-op under the radar of the digital banking system. All without turning into survivalist nut-jobs or worrying about killer robots trying to assassinate your leaders.”

When Janice and Carlie arrived, they were accompanied by Carlie’s friend, Chalice, who’d heard so much from Carlie about the family’s glorious new abode that she’d talked her mother into letting Janice whisk her away for a quick tour.

“Come and see my bedroom!” Carlie demanded. Dan hadn’t even reassembled the shelves there, but the sheer novelty of the place seemed to be enough to keep his daughter enchanted, and if her friend was unimpressed, she was polite enough not to show it.

At least the fridge had been running long enough that they had some cold fruit juice to offer their guest when the tour was over.

“Chalice’s mother has her own fashion line, and her own perfumes, just like Japonica,” Carlie explained, as she dabbed a foref inger curiously into the ring of condensation her glass had left on the table.

“Aha.” Dan glanced questioningly at Janice, who returned an expression of pure agnosticism.

“I don’t want that kind of high-pressure lifestyle myself,” Chalice said. “I just want people to be able to look at the pictures of my ordinary day, and see how to stay healthy and stylish on a budget.”

Janice said, “I think it’s time I drove you home.”

Dan went to put up the shelves. When he was done, he toured the apartment himself and took stock of things. The place looked even smaller now they’d fur-nished it, but it was clean, and the rent was reasonable. They’d got out of the mortgage just in time and managed to land on their feet.

When Carlie was in bed, Janice said, “I have some news.”

She was f idgeting with her wedding ring, which was a bad sign; when she was stressed, she got eczema on her f ingers.

“We’re going to end the strike. No one can hold out any more.”

“Okay.” Dan wasn’t surprised; the tribunal had ruled a week before that the nurses should return to work and re-start negotiations, and the decision had come with a deadline and the threat of f ines for non-compliance.

“But the hospital’s already sent out dismissal notices to 20 percent of the work-force.” Janice held up her phone. The message was shorter than Dan’s own conversation with Human Resources.

“I’m sorry.” Dan took her hand. Her job had been ten times harder than his—and though she’d worked in the same ward for the last eight years, they’d never made her position permanent. As a casual employee, she wouldn’t get a cent in severance pay. “At least we’ll have a bit left over from the equity in the house, once the settlement goes through.”

“Enough to keep us af loat for three months?” she asked. That was how long they’d have to wait before they’d be eligible for the JobSearch Allowance.

28

Greg Egan

Asimov’s

“It should be.”

“ ‘Should’?”

Dan was meant to be on top of their finances; it was the one thing he was supposed to be good at. “If we’re careful,” he said. “And if nothing unexpected happens.”

8

Dan parked a hundred meters down the street from Graham’s house, and prepared to wait. For the last three days, he’d managed to spend an hour in the same spot without attracting any attention from the police or local residents, but if he was challenged he was willing to risk claiming that he’d come to visit his friend to discuss a personal matter, only to suffer cold feet. It sounded pathetic, but if the cops knocked on Graham’s door to test the story he was unlikely to f latly deny knowing Dan, and he might well be capable of sincerely believing that Dan could experience both an urge to conf ide in him, and a degree of reticence when it came to the crunch.

His phone rang; it was his sister Nina.

“How’s Adelaide?” he asked.

“Good. But we’re leaving next week.”

“Really? Going where?”

“Seville.”

“You’re moving to Spain?”

“No,” she replied, amused. “Seville as in Seville Systems—it’s the new town around the solar farm. It’s only about three hundred kilometers away.”

Dan had heard of a big new solar farm about to come online in South Australia, but he’d pictured it in splendid isolation. “Why are you moving to live next to a giant array of mirrors? If they’re going to be selling power to half the country, I’m sure you’ll be able to plug in from Adelaide.”

“The shire did a deal with the operators, and they’re setting up a new kind of community there. Locally grown food, zero carbon housing . . . it’s going to be fantastic!”

“Okay. But what will you do up there?” Nina had trained as a social worker, but as far as Dan knew she hadn’t been able to f ind a job in years.

“Whatever I want,” she replied. “Part of the deal with the company is a universal basic income for the residents. I’ll have plenty of ways to pass the time, though; I can keep on with my paintings, or I can work with disadvantaged youth.”

“Okay.”

“You should come!” Nina urged him. “You and Janice and Carlie . . . we’d have a great time.”

Dan said, “No, we’re too busy. There are a lot of opportunities we’re looking into here.”

“At least ask Janice,” Nina insisted. “Promise me you’ll think about it.”

“I’ve got to go,” Dan said. The courier’s van was pulling up in front of Graham’s house. “Call me when you get there, you can give me an update.”

“All right.”

Graham walked out with a white cardboard box about a meter across, and held it up with the bar code visible so the van would accept it. A hatch slid open, and he placed the package inside.

When the hatch closed, Graham slapped the side of the van, as if there were a human inside who needed this cue to know that he’d f inished. As the van drove off, Dan half expected him to raise a hand in farewell, but he lowered his eyes and turned away.

The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine

29

November/December 2017

Dan didn’t risk driving past the house; he circled around the block, catching up with the yellow-and-red van as it approached the arterial road he’d guessed it would be taking, unless this mysterious Medici just happened to live in the same suburb as their Michelangelo. When it turned, heading east, Dan managed to get into the same lane, a couple of cars behind it.

The van maintained its course for ten minutes, twenty minutes, ascending the income gradient. Dan had already spent enough time rehearsing his encounter with Graham’s patron; now he just tried to block the script from his mind so he wouldn’t start second-guessing himself. In the script, he had phrased his request as a business proposition, in language so oblique that even if the whole thing was recorded, half of any jury would refuse to interpret it as blackmail.

He wasn’t proud of himself, but he had to get the family over the line somehow.

The government’s computers had convinced themselves that he and Janice had willfully frittered away their savings, so they were facing an increased waiting period for income support. Dan had spent the last six weeks trying to understand the basis for the decision, in the hope of having it reversed, but he had been unable to extract any coherent narrative from the department’s online portal. Apparently some f ly-spot in the multidimensional space of all welfare applicants’ f inancial prof iles had ended up correlated with prof ligacy, and that was that: once you fell into the statistical red zone, no one was obliged to point to any single act you’d committed that was manifestly imprudent.

The van shifted lanes, preparing to turn at the next set of lights. Dan was surprised; anyone who could afford sixty grand a year for designer porn ought to be a little more upmarket when it came to real estate. He smiled grimly; when a few hundred thousand data points couldn’t separate his behavior from that of a welfare cheat, who was he to start prof iling af icionados of Graham’s special talent?

The van turned north; Dan followed. The street was mixed residential, with well maintained but unspectacular houses, retail strips, occasional off ice blocks.

As it approached a row of fast-food restaurants, the van slowed, then turned into the parking lot. Dan was confused; even if it was able to make time for another pick-up along the way, because the ice-cream cake was so well insulated against the afternoon heat, this was an odd site to do it. Was there a driver on board after all? Dan hadn’t actually seen into the front of the vehicle. Despite its uniform na-tionwide livery, the courier company was a franchise; maybe one local owner-operator had decided to buck the trend and sit behind a steering wheel.

Dan followed the van into the parking lot. It still hadn’t settled on a spot, despite passing half a dozen empty ones, but maybe the driver wanted to get closer to the Indian take-away at the far end of the strip. He stayed well behind but decided not to risk parking yet, gesturing to an approaching station wagon to take the spot that he seemed to be coveting.

The van stopped beside a dumpster. The lid was propped up, angled low enough to keep out the elements but still leaving an opening at the side so large that all but the most uncoordinated members of the public who lobbed their trash in as they drove past would stand a good chance of succeeding.

The hatch opened at the side of the van, and Graham’s pristine white box emerged, riding on a gleaming stainless steel plate. When the platform was fully extended the box sat motionless, and Dan clung for a moment to a vision of the rightful recipient, appearing from nowhere in a designer hoodie to snatch up their prized fetish-dessert and dash from the parking lot to a limousine waiting on the street.

Perhaps a whole convoy of limousines, with decoys to render pursuit impossible.

But then some hidden mechanism gave the box a push and it toppled in to join the chicken bones and greasy napkins.

30

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Asimov’s

9

“We’ll move in with my mother,” Janice decided.

“She has one spare room. Which she uses for storage.” Dan could feel his sweat dampening the sheet beneath him. The night wasn’t all that warm, but his body had started drenching his skin at random moments, for no reason he could fathom.

“We can deal with the junk,” Janice said. “She’ll be glad to have it tidied up. I can sleep in the spare bed with Carlie, and you can sleep on the couch. It will only be for a couple of months.”

“How do you know she’ll even agree to have us?”

“Do you think she’d let her granddaughter sleep in a car?”

“Do you think I would?” Dan replied.

Janice pursed her lips reprovingly. “Don’t twist my words around. I know you’ve done everything you can. And I know I have too—which doesn’t make me feel any less guilty, but it makes it easier for me to swallow my pride. If we’d pissed all our savings away on . . . whatever the government’s brilliant algorithm thinks our vices are . . . then I’d probably be tearing my hair out in self-loathing while I tried to keep my voice calm on the phone to her, begging for that room. But we’ve done nothing wrong. We need to be clear about that, for the sake of our own sanity, then take whatever the next step is that will keep a roof over our heads.”

Dan must have fallen asleep around three, because when he woke at a quarter past four, he felt the special, wretched tiredness that was worse than not having slept at all.

He rose and walked out of the bedroom. In the living room, he switched on his laptop and squinted painfully at the sudden brightness of the screen. He went through the ritual of checking the JobSeekers site, TaskRabbit, and a dozen other places that supposedly offered business and employment opportunities, but—once you weeded out the pyramid schemes and the outright phishing scams—never seemed to carry anything legitimate for which he had the skills or the capital.

His mail program beeped softly. He kept his eyes averted from the alert that came and went on the upper right of the screen; he didn’t want to know about yet another plea from one of the charities he’d stopped supporting. What did he actually bring to the world, now? If he disappeared at this moment, it would be as if the air had closed in on empty space.

He opened the program to delete the unread message, but he didn’t succeed in going through the motions without seeing the sender. The email was from Baker and Saunders, the American law firm. The subject line read: SETTLEMENT OFFER.

Dan opened the message. His eyes were still bleary; he had to enlarge the text to read it. Deepity Systems were prepared to settle out of court. They were offering a payment of thirty thousand dollars per year, for five years, to every single litigant in Dan’s age and skill cohort.

He reread the message a dozen times, searching for the downside: the toxic fine print that would turn the victory sour. But he couldn’t f ind it. He opened the attachment, the formal agreement the lawyers had drafted; it was five times longer than the summary, and ten times harder to follow, but there’d been a time when he’d been used to reading f inancial contracts, and none of the language set alarm bells ringing.

Just before dawn, Janice emerged from the bedroom.

“What are you looking at?” she asked, sitting beside him.

The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine

31

November/December 2017

He switched back to the body of the email and slid the laptop across so she could read it. He watched her frowning in disbelief as the scale of the offer sank in.

“Is this real?”

Dan was silent for a while. It was a good question, and he needed to be honest with her.

“If I sign this,” he said, “then I believe we’ll get the money they’re promising. The only thing I’m not sure about is . . . why.”

“What do you mean? Presumably they’re afraid that the courts might make them pay even more.”

Dan said, “If you were a tech mogul, what would your fantasy of the near-term future be?”

“Colonies on Mars, apparently.”

“Sticking to Earth, for now.”

Janice was losing patience, but she played along. “I don’t know. That business keeps booming? That my stock options keep going through the roof ?”

“But what if a large part of your business consists of selling things that put people out of work. Including many of the people who actually pay for the things you’re trying to sell.”

“Then you’ve screwed yourself, haven’t you?”

Dan said, “Unless you can find a way to keep your customers afloat. You could try to talk the wealthier governments into paying everyone a UBI—and sweeten it a bit by offering to pitch in with a bit more tax yourself. You and your machines become the largest sector of the economy; what used to be the labor force is reduced to the role of consumer, but the UBI plugs them into the loop and keeps the money circu-lating—without breadlines, without riots in the street.”

“Well, they can dream on,” Janice replied. “Whatever Nina’s got going in Seville, that’s never going to be universal.”

“Of course not,” Dan agreed. “Between the politics, and the different ideas everyone has about personal responsibility, it’s never going to fly. Not as one size fits all.

But you know, the computers at Thriftocracy always managed to find a repayment plan that suited every client. Once you’ve gathered enough information about someone, if your goal isn’t actually harmful to them, you can usually find a way of repackaging it that they’re willing to swallow.”

Janice was fully awake now. “Are you about to pull some kind of Callum on me?”

Dan shook his head. “I don’t think it’s even a conspiracy, let alone a plan that the computers dreamed up all by themselves. But Thriftocracy didn’t need anyone conspiring in order to start managing people. They just offered a service that met other companies’ needs. If enough tech firms believe they can benefit from novel ways of limiting the blowback as they hollow out the middle class, achieving that will become an industry in its own right.”

“So . . . they organize law suits against themselves?”

“Why not? Especially when they’ll never go to court.” Dan glanced admiringly at the agreement the bots had crafted. There might have been tens of thousands of people in the class action, but it wouldn’t have surprised him if the language of this particular document had been tailored for his eyes alone. “They can’t quite achieve what they really aspire to, but they’re smart enough to understand that the only way to get close is to feed us some version of our own fantasies. They had me pegged, near enough: I would have been happy to win a legal battle against the fuckers who took my job away. But they’re more than willing to customize their approach, and if Chalice’s mother wants to think she’s a fashion icon whose every doodle on her tablet starts clothing factories humming in China, or Graham needs to believe he has a patron hanging out for every word that pops into his head about naughty teenagers, if 32

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Asimov’s
it gets the job done, so be it. I suppose they must have judged Callum to be too paranoid to accept their handouts without becoming suspicious, so they tried to turn that into an advantage and at least give him a sense of purpose and a bit of support from a like-minded community. Then I came blundering in and spoiled it with the horrible, horrible truth.”

Janice rubbed her eyes, still not really sold on his own paranoid vision but not quite certain, either, that he was wrong.

She said, “So what do you want to do?”

Dan laughed. “Want? We have no choice. If we don’t take this money, your mother will have stabbed me through the arm with a carving knife before the end of the school term.”

10

Once the settlement was finalized and the first tranche was in Dan’s bank account, the ads soon followed. They followed him to every web site, however many times he purged cookies, or rebooted his modem to get a fresh IP address.

“This watch will get your f itness back on track!” an avatar who looked a lot like the old, f iltered version of Dan promised. “Come on, you’re not over the hill yet!”

alter-Dan goaded him, running up and down steeply sloping streets until his man-ly stubble glistened and his resting heart rate plummeted.

“Three simultaneous channels of premium streaming entertainment, including Just For Kids, plus unlimited interactive gaming!” This from a woman who resembled Janice, to reassure him that there really was no need to consult her; like her doppelgänger, she was certain to approve.

Dan almost felt ungrateful each time he declined to click through to a purchase.

After all, wasn’t a tithe for his not-so-secret benefactors the new def inition of giving something back?

Janice found a volunteer position with a homelessness charity, tending to people who’d had surgery but whose post-operative recovery was adversely affected by a lack of food, showers, and beds. Dan offered his own services to the same group, but since he had no relevant skills and their rosters were full, they declined. He looked into an organization that did odd jobs and gardening for pensioners, but then realized they were just undercutting the paid market.

The money, while it lasted, would keep his family out of poverty, but it wasn’t enough to pay for any kind of formal retraining. Dan scoured the web, looking at free online courses, trying to decide if any of them would actually render him employable.

Apparently, he could learn to be proficient in all the latest programming languages and data mining methods in as little as twelve months, but everyone else from Ban-galore to Zambia had already jumped on that bandwagon. And how many software engineers did it take to skill-clone a million software engineers? No more than it took to clone just one.

On his way to pick up Carlie, Dan saw the windscreen-wiping Dalmatian waving its squeegee from the side of the road.

He slowed the car, reluctantly, knowing he’d feel bad whatever he did. He still hadn’t restarted his donations to Médecins Sans Frontières; on any sane analysis, the family’s new budget just didn’t stretch that far, however worthy the cause. But the bedraggled mutt pushed some button in him that even footage of a malarial child couldn’t reach.

He waited for the dog to f inish its slapdash routine, more a ritual than a service.

The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine

33

November/December 2017

The stitching was coming apart on the costume, leaving one of the eyes dangling, and there were burrs all over the parts of the material where it hadn’t worn too thin to hold on to them.

Dan f ished a f ive-dollar bill out of his wallet. As the exchange took place, he reached out with his other hand and squeezed the dog’s forearm in what he’d meant as a gesture of solidarity. His f ingers came together as they pushed against the dirty fabric, until they encircled a hard, slender rod.

He let go of the bill, and the dog waited, silent and motionless, for Dan to release his grip. Dan peered into the dark maw of its mouth, from which he’d always imagined the occupant was peering out, but as his eyes adapted he could see all the way to the back of the vacant head.

What was inside the costume, below, out of sight? A metal armature, a few motors, a battery, and an old smart phone running it all?

Dan let go of the dog’s arm. “Good for you,” he said, wondering if the thing’s in-genious creator would ever hear his words, but maybe the software extracted a few highlights to replay at the end of each day. He didn’t feel cheated; whoever would be getting his money probably needed it just as much as if they’d been here to collect it in person.

At the school gate, Dan still had trouble looking Graham in the eye. When Carlie ran up the path, he smiled and gave her his full attention, blocking out everything else.

“So how was school today?” he asked, as they walked toward the car.

“All right.”

“Just all right?”

“Ms. Snowball’s really boring,” she complained.

“Boring?” Dan gazed down at his daughter, mock-aghast. “You don’t want to hurt her feelings, do you?”

Carlie glared back at him, unamused. “I want Ms. Jameson to come back.”

“That’s not going to happen.” The trial was over, but the budgetary savings were locked in. A teaching assistant could watch over three classes at once, for far less than the cost of a human teacher for each.

On the drive home, Dan tried to picture the life Carlie would face. For the last few weeks, all he’d been able to envision was a choice between the family joining a com-mune in Nimbin to weave their own underwear out of hemp, or resigning themselves to their role laundering money for Silicon Valley.

They approached the Dalmatian, which waved cheerfully.

“Daddy, can we—?”

“Sorry, I already did.” Dan gestured at the streaked suds still drying on the windscreen.

Then he said, “How’d you like to learn to make Ms. Snowball’s head come off ?”

“You’re silly.”

“No, I’m serious! How’d you like to learn to make her do whatever you want?” Either they moved out into the countryside and became subsistence farmers, or they stayed and fought to regain some kind of agency, using the only weapons that worked now. The idea that every person in the world ought to learn to code had always struck Dan as an infuriating piece of proselytizing, as bizarre as being told that everyone just had to shut up and become Rastafarian. But in the zombie apocalypse, no one ever complained that they needed to learn to sharpen sticks and drive them into rotting brains. It wasn’t a matter of cultural homogeneity. It was a question of knowing how to fuck with your enemy.

“Do you really know how to do that?” Carlie asked.

“Not yet,” Dan confessed. “But I think that if we work hard, we’ll be able to figure it out together.” ❍

34

Greg Egan

CONFESSIONS

OF A

CON GIRL

Nick Wolven

Nick Wolven tells us, “A novelist whose name I can’t remember, asked in an interview where she got her ideas, said that she always began by imagining characters, and that her characters first appeared to her as vivid, visual hallucinations. She looked out a window, or stepped out a door, and saw fictional strangers striding toward her down the street. This story began with an auditory impression. I was on the New York subway, somewhere north of 59th Street, when I distinctly heard a young woman speaking, in roughly the manner I’ve tried to capture here.” In addition to his publications in Asimov’s, Nick’s stories have recently appeared in Clarkesworld and Analog.

Senior Thesis submitted to the Department of English, ––––– University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts August 22, 20––

By: Sophie Lee

The first thing to say, at the outset of my narrative, is it was not according to my own wishes to write this senior paper. The reason being for three reasons. Firstly, because, try as I might, I no longer believe I will ever be a “good writer,” which was the primary objective of pursuing an English degree. Which is a great disappointment to me, as being a good writer has been among the foremost of my lifelong passions.

Second, another reason is because I do not believe I am in any way a credit to such a prestigious university as I attended, being, as I am, a Con girl, which my title says.

So I do not think I am worthy of the BA in English degree. And the only reason I am writing this now is because my Re-Engagement Process Counselor recommended I do so, as a step on my process to healing, and to put behind me all the painful experiences that have occurred.

Thirdly, the last reason I didn’t want to write this paper is because the thesis of the assignment is to explicate how I became a Con girl, what I did wrong, how I became a shame to everyone in my life, and the lifelong steps that brought me to this 35

November/December 2017
debacle. But, as I have confessed, I strongly doubt my ability to explicate how this happened. Would I conscientiously aspire to be a scourge on society, an embarrassment to my parents, a disappointment to my teachers and friends?

Emphatically, no.

Yet, that is what happened.

Truly, sometimes I believe I am no longer sure of anything. An example would be today. I was sitting outside my institution, in the yard with the high fence and the concrete sculptures of trees. And I was reflecting on my healing process, when a leaf blew into my hair—a real leaf, from a real tree outside our yard. And I lifted up a hand and crushed it—“as one does.” But when I looked at the crushed leaf, I had a feeling, what our Re-Engagement Process Counselor calls “an unprovoked grief episode.” I thought about how I had crushed that leaf for no reason, without even thinking, out of habit. I thought about how this is what I do, touch things and ruin them, without even trying.

I thought about how I’m a Con girl now, a negative member of society, who has to be put in this place, apart from everyone, because she has been such a harm to others.

And it was like those times when they first brought me here, in those days when I couldn’t even talk or think, but only used to sit by myself, not moving.

All this, yes, because of a leaf, which, as anyone knows, has no nerves, and which anyhow this one was already dead.

This is the kind of thing that occurs with me nowadays, after everything else that has transpired.

I am a Con girl. And in case you can’t tell, I’m still trying really hard to figure out how that could have happened.

The place to begin, I believe, is my last week of school. And the subject I will begin with is my End-of-Semester Meeting, with my assigned Learning Process Advisor, Mr. Barraine.

Now, the thing I must stress at the outset is I believe Mr. Barraine to be a good person—flawed as we all are, but who isn’t flawed? I have never once doubted that he wanted the best for me and my life process. You can check out his Perma-Me profile online. Do it now. You will discover that Mr. Barraine has two little girls at home whom he cares for very tenderly. One of whom is afflicted with a disability, but which has nevertheless in no way lessened Mr. Barraine’s affection for her. There is a de-lightful video of Mr. Barraine and his daughters feeding bread crumbs to ducks in the park, and as the adorable birds waddle and gabble, you can see Mr. Barraine relating with his children and laughing, while in his eye there is the sparkle of genuine joy.

Many commenters to this video have asserted that Mr. Barraine should not have been feeding the ducks in that manner, because bread crumbs are bad for them and disrupt their normal dietary habits, so feeding the ducks is in some aspects para-mount to murdering them. But I in no way believe this should be taken as a mark against Mr. Barraine, who is not an ornithologist.

I mention all this because on the day in question, Mr. Barraine was meeting with me to discuss my upcoming Final Academic Review, which under the circumstances, I realize, must have been for him a very trying experience.

I arrived at his office punctually, and the first thing Mr. Barraine said was, “Hi, Sophie, I hope you’re doing okay.”

At which I almost started crying, because as Mr. Barraine knew, I was not doing okay, and there was practically no way I was going to do better, or anyway not in time to make a difference. But it was nice of him to say that.

He closed the door, and checked that it was closed, and covered the window, and checked that it was covered, and then he showed me where to sit, and said, “Shall we get started?”

36

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Then Mr. Barraine touched his palmscreen, and the pictures on the walls disappeared, and instead of sitting in an office with books and old-time paintings, we were sitting in the middle of a display of my academic records, which was not a nice place to be.

“Let’s see what we have here,” Mr. Barraine said, flicking his finger to sort through the files.

At that moment I did start crying, because I didn’t need to see those files to know what this was about. It was all displayed in my palmscreen, where my Pro/Con Holistic Score was glowing a shameful, awful yellow.

Mr. Barraine was respectful while I cried. I have always been grateful to him for what he said next. He said:

“Now, Sophie, I want you to know that everything that happens in this interview is entirely private and unrecorded. So you can express whatever you feel without it affecting your holoscore. If you need to express some anger, go right ahead. You can even call me nasty names, if that’ll help. Do you want to try that? Do you want to call me nasty names?”

He smiled, and it was so nice of him to say that, in that particular way, that I laughed even while I was crying.

“People have done that, you know,” said Mr. Barraine. “A lot of young people have sat where you’re sitting, and called me all kinds of nasty names.”

At that, I felt so bad for Mr. Barraine that I stopped feeling bad for myself, and like that, my tears cleared up and I was ready to begin.

“Of course,” said Mr. Barraine, “if you in any way violate the Campus Interpersonal Conduct Policy, that will have to be immediately reported. Now, let’s get going.”

He brought up a chart that showed my grades, and a chart that showed my peer networks, and a hundred other charts that showed a hundred different things. But at the center of it all was my Pro/Con holistic score, glowing on a display in the middle of the wall, so awful I could hardly look at it.

“I’m looking over your records,” Mr. Barraine said, “especially at your holistic score, Sophie, and it seems like during the past few years, we’ve started to see—”

“I’m in the yellow,” I said, feeling breathless. “I know. And I can explain.”

But what I want to underscore, at this juncture in my narrative, is that I have never been one to, as people say, “toot my own horn.”

What follows is a quote from my family’s Vice Assistant Childrearing Advisor, who prepared my first ever psychological profile:

Sophie . . . has incredibly well-developed sensitivities. Her reading of facial expressions is advanced for her age, and her various empathetic reactions are off the charts. As to her intellectual apti-tudes, they show . . . potential for great improvement. The danger is that with such high sensitivities, Sophie may face unique life challenges. But with proper mood management, I believe she will grow up to be an extremely positive social member.

Now, “the proper way to interpret praise,” as my Test Prep Advisor says, “is as a challenge to do better, not a reward for what you’ve done.” So I believe this is good advice, and see my above-average empathetic abilities, which my VACR so carefully documented, not as something I can take credit for myself, but as a responsibility unto which I have been given. Thus, I have always endeavored to use my empathetic and facial-reading talents, such as they may be, for the constructive support of others.

And this is what I endeavored to achieve, for example, in my fourteenth year, when my mother decided that my father no longer fulfilled her needs as life partner. This Confessions of a Con Girl

37

November/December 2017

“The bane of a writer’s life is careerism: the swarm of duties and petty jealousies that nibble away at youthful hopes. When I got serious about selling fiction, professional mentors prescribed a simple regimen: to make a living you had to sell novels, to sell novels you had to sell stories, and to sell short stories you had to ‘know the market,’ i.e., subscribe to short fiction journals.

“Only now can I see the self-interest behind this advice—professional mentors wanted me to support the journals in which they were already publishing. At the time, more naïve and more gluttonous for success, I collected a pile of short fiction publications. I slogged through them, always with my own self-interest in mind.

Where would I submit? What would I sell? How would I take my first tentative steps toward literary legitimacy?

“I read, I wrote, I revised, I mailed. I soon discovered that nothing curtails creativity like the mindset induced by market research.

“I have rarely enjoyed a story I forced myself to read; I have never sold a story I wrote only for profit. And I’ve never learned anything about the short fiction market I wouldn’t have learned by reading for fun.

“Not for lack of trying. F. Scott Fitzgerald said late in life that he wrote with the

‘authority of failure’; in my twenties, I learned the lessons taught by a long-running lack of success. After years of grueling market research, after dozens of lapsed subscriptions to unread journals, after thousands of submissions written and dispatched in a spirit of shameless ambition, after oodles of wasted hours and umpty empty words, I have only ever published stories in magazines I already loved to read.

“And the first and foremost of these is Asimov’s.

“In a musty box in my father’s attic, a year or so ago, I came across my parents’

archive of back issues. They went all the way back to the founding of the journal—in 1977, the year I was born. It was a strange experience to read those early stories, which I found light and polite, almost timid. The furor of SF’s new wave had waned, the cyberpunk revolution was still booting up, the genre had yet to be refreshed by today’s array of new views and varied voices.

“My own introduction to Asimov’s came in the nineties, when I found my way to the magazine through the pages of anthologies. Every year, I read Gardner Dozois’

collection of the year’s best science fiction; every year, I checked the credits listings; every year, my favorite stories came from Asimov’s. Why not just read the magazine itself?

“So I have, off and on, for a quarter century. Not always faithfully, not always fer-vidly, and with frequent divagations into different journals. But always with a pleasant sense of longstanding familiarity, and with continual delight in new discoveries—the whimsical worlds of Henry Lien, the audacious language games of Megan Arkenberg, the sober social SF of Sarah Gallien.

“One of the undersung truths of literature—and yes, science fiction is literature—is that the whole affair, with its pretensions and pomposities, is entirely a matter of habit. When I glimpse a typical Asimov’s cover, with its serifless font and supersatu-rated art, memory loops through countless prior impressions—and I’m briefly twenty-five, twenty-two, seventeen again.

“I’m sure my Asimov’s habit will continue for a long time to come.”

—Nick Wolven
was an example of a challenging experience. But I reminded myself that people differ, and sometimes achieving true intimacy means finding a partner who, as people say, “makes the grade.” Also because people achieve life aims at different rates. And the truth is, as we all observed, since we had gotten the extra funds for my Student 38

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Asimov’s

Development Program, my father had no longer been putting as much effort into his own life process as previous.

Thus, when my mother sued my father for mishandling my Student Development money, I understood why she might feel the need to do that, but also how difficult it would be for my father not to be a part of my development anymore. And I did everything I could to express how I still loved them both and supported them, which I posted every day on my Perma-Me profile.

And it was during this admittedly trying interval that I noticed my efforts did not go unacknowledged. Because partway through the year, my teacher, Ms. Ebro, requested a private meeting with me. We signed the privacy waivers, and went into the school’s privacy room, and activated the privacy settings, and while we were in there, Ms. Ebro told me how she and the other teachers had observed what was occurring with me. How they had been following my mother’s video diary of the lawsuit online, plus the posts my mother had been putting on her RantSpace page, about my father and the divorce. Also they had been following the videos my father had been sharing on his RantSpace page, about my mother, in some of his more disinhibited moments.

And they had seen the page my father’s girlfriend had made about my mother and the posts my mother had written about me. And Ms. Ebro said it was truly shocking to see what some people will say online about their families.

This was a significant moment for me.

But what Ms. Ebro said was how she and the other teachers had been observing my own behavior in response to these developments. And how they appreciated my maturity. And she said that sometimes being brave and mature is at least as important as, per example, learning to solve for x or studying pond life.

“After all,” Ms. Ebro said, “we know what kind of person you are, Sophie. And when I say that, I’m sure you know exactly what I’m referring to.”

I did, but didn’t say so. But what truly affected me was what Ms. Ebro said next. She said she had talked to the other teachers, and they would be factoring these consider-ations into my holistic semester scores, in conjunction with my scholastic grades.

And I admit, I may have overresponded a little when Ms. Ebro said all this. But it was not to my detriment. Because afterward, my Pro/Con Holistic Score went very green. As I had just gotten my first palmscreen implanted, this was a source of significant comfort to me. I used to pull up the covers at night, and turn on my palmscreen, and sit in a kind of glowing green cave, and think about all the opinions that had gone into that holoscore, all the comments my peers had made about me, all the grades my teachers had submitted, all the assessments of my Student Development Team. And how all this information, so judiciously evaluated, was presented in this simple green light, to remind me of the support and positive feelings I had brought into the world.

Well, that is just one example of a time when I demonstrated Pro behavior.

There were others, like when my Wealth Management Advisor had his collapse, or when my Physical Development Coach was accused of improper child handling. But what I want to talk about now is what happened with Roman Cheryshev.

This was in sophomore year of college, when Roman Cheryshev was a freshman in my Consciousness Through Confrontation seminar. And the thing about Roman was, he was very bright, but he was not the kind of person whose company other people enjoyed. I don’t know how Roman got to be in our institution, which is a prestigious institution. But the fact is, only a month after he got in, Roman’s Pro/Con Holistic Score was moving toward the yellow. At f irst I thought he might be from a culture where Pro/Con standards are different from ours. But no, he was from New Jersey. Then someone told me Roman’s parents had homeschooled him for the Comp-Sci track, and hired a service to manage his scores, which I know is a Confessions of a Con Girl

39

November/December 2017
thing that happens. But I believe it is an ill-advised thing, as in, what will transpire when such a young person enters, as people say, “the real world”?

In any event, Roman was not socially fluent, which made me feel a lot of empathy for him. In seminar, he would become upset when people told him ways in which his behavior was entitled and offensive, which was not only a very Con reaction, but also contrary to the very aims of the course. But I reflected how difficult it must be to be without strong social capacities, so I became his friend.

This proved difficult. Partly because my peer network kept giving me Con votes for bringing Roman to social occasions, impacting on my holoscore very negatively.

But also because Roman, for whatever reasons, also kept giving me Con ratings! I don’t understand why he would give me a Pro rating one night and a Con the next, inasmuch as we spent all our time the same way, which was with me listening while Roman expressed his anger. Roman did have a lot of anger. To confront someone about their Pro/Con votes is, of course, a very Con behavior, but when I hinted at my feelings, Roman said:

“What, you think you’re special, Sophie? You think you deserve some kind of reward for hanging out with me? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

I told Roman I didn’t think I was special, and what I enjoyed about him was his honesty.

At which he said: “Well, I think you’re full of s**t, how’s that for honesty? But whatever.”

Which was the kind of thing Roman often said to me.

This was when we were hanging out in his room almost every night, eating pizza and talking about Roman’s feelings. And that was where we were one Saturday night, when Roman suddenly got a funny look. Now by this time, confessedly, my Pro/Con Holistic Score was not so green as previous. I had brought Roman to several events with my peer network, where he experienced issues related to inappropriate touching. So I was beginning to be conflicted about the friendship. Also, it may be that my sensitivity, though usually high, was not so high as ordinarily. In any event, when Roman did what he did, I reacted uncharacteristically, which I mean, by getting scared and kicking him in the face.

These are the words Roman said to me, that night, which I quote here not to be adverse, but only in the spirit of veracity.

“B***h, what the f**k? Crazy t**t, you come here every night, playing on me, then I f inally get the balls to make a move, you shoot me down? Seriously? Moth-erf**king c**kteasing c**t.”

As noted, I have set all this down not to cause hurt, but because it is in fact what Roman said to me.

But the upshot is, after this incident, my Pro/Con Holistic Score took a gigantic hit.

And it was because Roman kept giving me Con votes! I tried to engage with him constructively about it, but he only told me I had “played him,” and how the worst thing a girl can do to a guy is give him those kinds of mixed signals. Then he told other guys I had “set him up,” and they all gave me Con votes, too! So I was receiving Con votes every day, and this, plus a few other, unrelated factors, was, as people say, “the perfect storm,” which made my holoscore begin to drop.

All this was what I explained to Mr. Barraine.

But Mr. Barraine said that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about, which was actually more regarding my academic records.

At which point he pulled up a file and said, “Sophie, now tell me honestly, do you know where this is going?”

At this time I was grateful no one else could see my face. Because in the file were the requirements for my major, which included my Peer Education Program.

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“We have a problem, don’t we?” said Mr. Barraine.

The problem was, for years, my Peer Education score had been going up and up, until it was very Pro, and then in the fifth year it began to go down, until it was very Con.

But I told Mr. Barraine I could explain, because this was in fact what I was trying to express to him.

And the thing I explained was, firstly, how much I appreciated the innovative spirit of our institution. Because a student goes to college to learn, correct? But who do students learn from most? Our peers, indubitably! So I thought it was very cred-itable of our institution to demand a full six years of Peer Education courses, which not only cuts down on the need for expensive professors, but is also empowering for the younger generation.

The problem was, in my f ifth year Peer Education course, I had been put in a workshop with Damaris Fierte, who, as everyone knows, is known for her unstinting efforts at peer education.

Now, at the time, Damaris Fierte had a deep green holoscore, whereas I, thanks to Roman, had only a pale green holoscore. So it was justifiable for her to educate me.

But still.

The workshop was on Personal Profile Management, in which we had to critique each other’s Perma-Me prof iles. And it was my turn to be critiqued. And the f irst thing Damaris Fierte critiqued about my Perma-Me profile was how I had devoted so much of my time to associating with a person like Roman Cheryshev.

“He’s a predator. An abuser. I mean, I don’t want to say this, but looking at your prof ile, Sophie, a person could get the impression—an employer, a potential contact—I mean, they could see you as some kind of enabler.”

At which I felt concerned, and explained how I had only felt sorry for Roman and was trying to be his friend.

At which Damaris said: “So you brought him to my friend’s party? Where he inappropriately touched people? This was someone you wanted for a friend?”

At which I said, I didn’t consider Roman a close friend, exactly, but more like a—

“What?” said Damaris. “If he wasn’t your friend, what did you want from him? Just to use him? Just for the Pro votes?”

I was now beginning to see some of the workshop participants looking at me very problematically.

Then Damaris said: “I think this is an important lesson in Profile Management, guys. Because when people look at your Personal Profile, an employer, a recruiter, what they want to see most is authenticity. If it seems like you’re taking on too many charity projects, or being nice to unpopular people just for the pity votes, I do think that can reflect on you very adversely.”

And in the final analysis, the workshop ended up giving me a strong critique.

But what I want to say is what happened after.

Because I went to Damaris after class and said did she really have to give me such a strong critique? And I wasn’t trying to say my Perma-Me profile wasn’t in need of improvement. But given there was a need for improvement, couldn’t there be a more constructive way to go about it?

This was when Damaris unloaded on me.

What she said was she had always had concerns. She said she could tell right away what kind of person I was, how I always overpromoted myself and my abilities. She said it was pathetic, how I talked, all the big words I tried to use, and when she looked at my Perma-Me profile, she didn’t think I belonged here at all, in this kind of prestigious institution. She said in fact we both knew exactly why I was here. And if there was one thing she didn’t like, Damaris said, it was a Yellow who acts like a Green, or a Red who thinks she’s a Yellow.

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At this point I began to have strong feelings. Because I remembered a day, weeks ago, when we had critiqued Damaris’s Perma-Me profile. Which was, admittedly, the best profile I ever saw. Damaris was from New York City, and she went to a private school and had a huge Child Development Team and lots of money since she was born. In her profile, there were so many extra classes and volunteer jobs and enrich-ment programs, I wondered how her Child Development Team could have found time to plan so many activities.

But there was one part of her Perma-Me profile that Damaris kept trying to skip, even though the class kept wanting to go back to it. It was a video of Damaris auditioning for the college’s summer LEO business mentorship program. Which under the video, Damaris had written:

DIDN’T GET IN, OH WELL, I’M JUST SO HAPPY TO HAVE HAD THE CHANCE FOR SUCH A GREAT

AND FUN AUDITION!!!!

But if you looked at the video, Damaris did not look happy. If you have ever spent a lot of time throwing up, from nerves or any other reason, let me tell you, you know the signs.

The strong feelings were because I remembered my own time in the LEO program.

And how I hadn’t even auditioned for it, but instead got in by special appointment.

The coordinators had to rush me through the enrollment process, then the training process, until I was the last one to get on the rocket. Even then, when I was sitting in my flight seat, strapping in, I could hardly believe I had gotten this far, me, Sophie Lee, a tourist in space.

When we got past the boost phase, into Low Earth Orbit, the program leader took us into the viewing chamber, and showed us the Earth so far below. The purpose of the program was to join business leaders on a trip to outer space, he said, and learn from their insights and leadership experience. It was business-sponsored, so it was a big honor. The program director had a company in financial services, and he said we had been chosen for this opportunity because of a time in our lives when we demonstrated exceptional leadership. Now was a chance for us to look down and think about the planet we might one day be leading, and what he wondered was, did any of us have anything we’d like to say?

At this point, I began to get a weird feeling in my stomach, and I unbuckled my harness and floated to the viewscreen, and looked down on the continents below.

Then I turned and looked at the business leaders buckled into their flight chairs, and what I said was that the main thing I was thinking was not how small the Earth seemed from up here, but how big.

At this, the business leaders all smiled and nodded.

I said it made me feel humble, thinking about what a challenge it must be, being a leader to such a huge place.

The business leaders now smiled and nodded very strongly.

But I kept feeling weird, and I said it seemed like such a big challenge, it actually seemed like an impossible challenge, like it was crazy to think you could try and control what was happening down there, or even really understand it.

At this point some of the business leaders stopped smiling and nodding, and I sensed it was time to go back to my seat and enjoy the complimentary low-grav spherical cocktails. But I still felt weird, so I kept talking.

What I said was, when you thought about it, to the Earth, human beings were basically like bugs, no more special than any other species, whether endangered or no.

What I said was, if you looked at it that way, what could an individual person, however accomplished, really count for?

What I said was, didn’t it almost seem crazy, all the way up here, for any one person to be richer or more important than another, and if you thought about it, if something 42

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were to unfortunately happen, and our spaceship were to explode on reentry, would it even make a difference to anyone down there, except of course our families?

After I said all this, none of the business leaders were smiling and nodding at all, and a lot of the other students were letting go of their cocktail spheres and looking at me, like, “What’s the matter with you?” Then, when we got back to Earth, I discovered my holoscore had dropped almost 20 percent, and all the business leaders had marked me down as being “definitely not leadership material.”

So that was what I told Damaris Fierte. And I said she was right about me. How I knew I didn’t belong here, in such a prestigious institution. In fact, what I said was that I envied her, because what I now realized was, the LEO business mentorship program was as big a risk as an opportunity, and in my case, having utterly blown it, I had totally tanked my holoscore.

At this Damaris looked at me a long time, and I could see her feelings had changed. Finally she said, “Sophie, you know, I think that’s the most honest thing I ever heard you say.”

But I blew it.

Because, the more I thought about it, the more I realized Damaris was right. How all this time, in college, even in my Childhood Development Program, I had been trying to be someone I was not, and to seem smarter than I was. And I was ashamed of myself.

So I said, “Damaris, the thing is, you really are a smart and amazing person. And you’re right, I don’t belong here, but you really do. And you should have been the one to go on the LEO trip, not me, because I truly believe one day you could be a great leader.”

At which she said, “No, no,” and looked sick again, shaking her head.

But I said, “No, seriously, I truly believe that.” And then I said what was probably the stupidest thing I ever said in my whole life, which was: “How come we’ve never been friends?”

But right away I could see I had majorly screwed up. Because Damaris stood back, and her mouth was open and she was panting, and she looked angrier than I’ve ever seen anyone get angry.

And she said, “Sophie, see, this is exactly what I’m talking about! Everything you do, it always has to be a big calculation. You say all these nice things, and I really believed you, and now I see you’re just manipulating me to join your stupid peer network and boost your holoscore!”

At which I didn’t say anything, because I was so surprised.

“This is truly shameful,” Damaris said as she walked away. “Truly, truly shameful.

I can’t even educate you in how shameful this is.”

And when I checked, I saw what I feared, which was that every person in Damaris’s peer network had given me an enormous Con vote.

Now, coming from someone with Damaris’s score, that meant something.

But when I told all this to Mr. Barraine, he shook his head.

“No, Sophie,” he said. “The Peer Education stuff, that’s only a sidebar. What we’re here about today is your major, especially your literature courses. And I have to tell you we’ve been noticing some very troubling signs.”

At this I was surprised, because since entering college I have become, as my Student Career Coach likes to say, a “true lover of the word.”

But Mr. Barraine used his palmscreen to display some different records, which I didn’t recognize, and he said, “Does this mean anything to you?” And when I said,

“No,” he said, “Are you sure?”

Then he came around his desk and pulled up a chair.

He said, “Sophie, do you know what the global rank of this institution is?”

I did, and I told him.

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Mr. Barraine said, “Do you know why we are ranked so high?”

I said it must be because of the university’s immense positive contributions to society.

Mr. Barraine smiled. “Do you know what the Ivy League graduate enrollment rate among our alumni is? The f irst-year employment rate? The average salary at ten years? The estimated value of our name as an attractor of venture capital? The alumni fundraising score? Or how about this?”

He brought up another chart, which covered almost a whole wall, and this one I definitely recognized.

“These are the private and public parties,” Mr. Barraine said, “who have agreed to invest in your education. Here’s the government’s contribution. Here’s AdverBetter.

Here’s ThinkTrendTrack. Here are all the media and marketing groups that loaned money for your Student Development Team. They all contributed to the financing of your education, Sophie, because your holoscore positioned you, at the time, as an immensely high-potential individual. I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.

The reason you’re in this school, Sophie, is because we don’t only educate students here. We educate the whole person.”

Mr. Barraine drew a round shape in the air, a little too round, I thought, inasmuch as it was supposed to be me. But this was not a time, I sensed, for critical remarks.

“With my approval,” Mr. Barraine said, “you’ll soon be meeting with representatives of these parties for your Final Academic Review. They’ll be evaluating you for employment opportunities. And they’ll be interested in seeing, as early-access recruiters, what their investment in you has produced. You’ll tell them, I’m sure, all about your enjoyment of our rare animal handling workshops, our AI-training program, our maglev-equipped, five-story VR athletics facility. But you’ll also tell them, of course, about your passionate engagement in our many humanities classes specializing in improved empathetic response. I believe you would agree that improving empathy is one of the major benefits of a liberal arts education. But Sophie, tell me, what do you think these people will say if they find out one of our top empathetic performers is, in fact, as it seems, deeply biased?”

I admit I responded inappropriately, by jumping out of my chair saying, “Biased?

How?”

Mr. Barraine leaned back. “Do you really want to ask me that question, Sophie? Do you not see how going into specif ics might, in fact, reify the very bias we’re discussing?” Then he pointed at the graphs and said, “These are your realtime empathetic assessments, which our team has been following closely.”

Now I was especially surprised, because realtime empathetic assessment has always been my favorite part of the literature major. In this time when the humanities are, as they say, “in crisis,” what better case could there be for the profound utility of the narrative arts? How many days have I whiled away in the scanning machines, resting my head in the EEG helmet, listening to the soothing flow of words or the images comporting vivaciously on the screen, and living along with the travails of Jane Eyre and Anna Karenina, of Sula and Nel, of Carrie and Charlotte and Mi-randa and Samantha? How often has it been a profound comfort to me to know that, in some small way, my empathetic responses to these great works will improve my positive contributions to society?

But as I communicated this to Mr. Barraine, he shook his head. “The trouble isn’t with your enthusiasm, Sophie. The trouble is the correlations. We’ve been looking at your neurological readings, and we’ve been noticing some problematic reactions. It’s not that you lack empathy. If anything, you have the opposite problem. You’ve been empathizing, I have to inform you, with some very unacceptable people.”

But I stood over him, feeling hopeful, and said, “Mr. Barraine, I can explain.”

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And what I explained was how, when I’m in the scanning machines, engaging with all the powerful issues in the stories I’m experiencing, sometimes I start to worry I might have a problematic response. And at times, I get so worried that I make myself have the response, but only for the sake of understanding the response, as part of my ever-vigilant efforts not to have the response. So the realtime empathetic assessment machines, as I told Mr. Barraine, are probably only picking up evidence of my constant mental vigilance against such responses, and of my earnest and engaged grap-pling with even the possibility of such responses.

If that makes sense.

But Mr. Barraine looked at me for a long time, and said, “Sit down, Sophie.”

So I did.

And he went on:

“My job, Sophie, is to prepare you for your f inal review. These people you’ll be meeting are some of the smartest people in the world: politicians, technologists, ad-vertisers, financiers. But the reason they want to meet with you is because that kind of smartness is no longer very valuable. Smartness is what computers have. And nowadays people are very expensive, and computers are very cheap. What’s valuable today, Sophie, is the ability to read human beings—to decipher their moods, their desires, their deepest longings and needs. That is the key to effective public relations.

That is what recruiters want. That is the kind of skill the holoscore is meant to assess, and that is what your holoscore said you could do. It is what made you a competitive student, and what helped you attract so much investment, and what got you admitted to this institution.

“Now, Sophie. What message do you think it will send if I let you meet with those recruiters, a graduating student of this college, and explain to them that after three million dollars and many years of top-tier education . . . well, what do you think they’ll say when they learn that, as you told me today, you befriended a sexual predator in your second year? When they find out you sabotaged the LEO business mentorship experience for a group of our top performers? When they see how your peers have been voting against you? Finally, what will they think when they look at your responses to these literary works, and learn how prone you are to empathizing with the wrong kinds of people?

“Sophie.” He leaned forward. “I’m afraid I can’t approve you for graduation at this time.”

I looked at Mr. Barraine, and I was feeling several feelings. Firstly, about how I was apparently a terrible person, but no one had told me in all this time. Second, how in my interacting with Roman and Damaris and others, I had misread all their social cues. Finally, how all those smart people were waiting to give me my review, and they had invested so much money in my education, and how would they feel when they found out the person they’d been educating had turned out to be selfish and cruel and biased?

Mostly, though, I thought about Mr. Barraine. How in that video on his Perma-Me profile, when one of his little girls got scared by the ducks, she turned and hid her face in his shirt. And it was like Mr. Barraine didn’t even need to think. He just kept smiling and tossing out bread crumbs, and with his arm he held her to him.

The next thing I knew, alarms were ringing, and Mr. Barraine was jumping away, wide-eyed and shouting and pounding on his palmscreen. And I saw how without even thinking about it, I had gotten out of my chair and pressed my face against his chest.

“I need to report,” Mr. Barraine said, “a violation of the Interpersonal Conduct Code, class 25B, section H12. Note: nonsexual contact was initiated by the student during an approved private meeting. Repeat note: contact was student-initiated and non sexual. I have disengaged and am now departing the location.”

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November/December 2017

He moved to the door, holding out his palmscreen to record how carefully he was keeping his distance from me. And I could see the tears on his shirt and face as he said, “Sophie, how could you? Of all the things to try and . . . I have daughters. I have a family.”

Then, just before he left, he tapped his palmscreen. And the last thing I remember is looking at my own palm, and seeing the effect of the assessment he had given me, which was my Pro/Con holoscore, glowing a bright, ugly red.

It feels strange to be in a home for Con women. Everyone here is deep in the red, a confirmed negative influence on society. Yet during the day-to-day, you hardly know.

We have meals and watch TV. One woman here was a daycare worker who took care of learning-disabled children. One day she passed out during her duties, and one of the children had a fall and died. She doesn’t talk, but some of us take turns sitting with her. Then there is a woman who attempted suicide four times, and a drug ad-dict, whose name is Tina. One time, I told Tina about my struggles with Pro/Con voting, and she said:

“Oh, man, my people never gave me no votes. If they had feelings, they just acted on ’em. Ha, ha, yeah, they hit you soft, that means they only hate you a little. But if they hit hard, well, then they must really love you.” Then Tina laughed, looking at my face, and said, “Oh, Sophie, that’s why I like you, girl, you always take things so serious.”

She said she wanted me to know they were all giving me Pro votes around here, though admittedly, given their own scores, it wouldn’t count for much.

Nobody can understand why I’m in this place. To be honest, I don’t understand either. I used to be at the top of the Pro ratings, attend a prestigious university, go to meetings with the country’s biggest business leaders. What I want now is for my narrative to be a help to others, and aid them in avoiding the pitfalls I have taken. There are times, though, when I feel like I will never understand, and always be deep in the red, no good to anyone.

As for what transpired after my meeting with Mr. Barraine? That particular time is hard to recall. They say that when the officials came, I was sitting in a chair in his office, and wouldn’t move. For weeks after, I wouldn’t speak or do anything. They had to bring me to a hospital and take care of me. I remember I was there when my mother came, and told me she was sorry for everything, and reminded me that while it is very easy to fall into the red, it can be very difficult to climb back out. Some of the underwriters of my education also came, and reminded me about the opportunities I could still have if I remembered my responsibilities and pulled myself together.

But mostly I just sat there, doing nothing, except falling ever deeper into the red.

I thought about the negative scores I had given people in my life, and the friends I had voted out of my peer network, and how one time my mother had wanted to talk about my father, and I had slammed the door. But mostly I thought about the reason this all started, which is the one thing I haven’t talked about, because to be truthful it still feels so weird.

This was in seventh grade, when they introduced an autistic boy into our school, as part of an experimental program. He was seriously autistic, so nobody wanted to be near him, because he would do things like grabbing you when you didn’t expect. But there were some people he liked, and one of those people was me.

Then one day, some other kids were doing something to the autistic boy, and suddenly he started to howl and ran across the lunchroom, throwing his arms around me from behind. I don’t know what the other kids had done. All I knew is, the autistic boy was hugging me in a way where I couldn’t breathe. That was the day everything changed. Because people began to panic and shout, as there had been prior 46

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incidents. And the more they shouted, the harder the boy squeezed, until my head began to go dark.

But instead of struggling, I whispered to the boy, and reached up a hand and stroked his arm. After a while he loosened his grip. I felt very calm. And I turned around and hugged him back. It surprised everyone. When the boy’s parents saw the videos that had been taken, they started a Pro-Vote campaign on my behalf, even though the boy had to go into an institution because of what he did. And the campaign took off, the Pro votes came in, millions of votes from around the world. That was what made my holoscore go so deep into the green, and what made me seem like such a promising student, and why so many investors wanted to put their money into my Child Development Program. And that was why everything turned out the way it did.

But what I remembered, while I was lying all that time without moving, was how it actually felt, when the autistic boy grabbed me. How I was so scared I wanted to scream. But I was also so scared I couldn’t scream. He was so much bigger than me, and he wouldn’t let go, and people were screaming about how I might die. I couldn’t even say why I did what I did. It was like there was a different person inside me, who lifted up a finger and gently brushed his hands. When he responded, I knew what to do, and I stood and put my arms around him. Everyone became silent. I remember him shaking, and making puffing noises, like a cat when it can’t stop sneezing. Then he began to quiet down, and I stroked my hands along his back, and put my cheek against his cheek. It was like there was no one else. It was like there was just us two.

I felt it go through him, a kind of hum, like a vibration I could feel in my hands. That was when I knew, just by the feel of him breathing—I knew he would be peaceful, this person in my arms. ❍

Confessions of a Con Girl

47

IN

DUBLIN,

FAIR CITY

Rick Wilber

Rick Wilber continues to be fascinated with alternate history stories of World War II. Most of his tales are fictional versions of the very real baseball player who became a spy, Moe Berg.

This is the third of those stories featuring Moe and the mystery woman who’s his boss. All three have appeared first in

Asimov’s. At least two more of the Moe Berg stories are in the works. The second novel of Rick’s S’hudonni Empire trilogy,

Alien Day, will be out in early 2018 from Tor Books. Most of the associated short stories about the S’hudonni Empire and the enigmatic alien, Twoclicks, first appeared in Asimov’s.

March 5, 1940

In Davy Byrne’s

The Luftwaffe was apparently dead serious about promising to level Dublin, so they’d sent the dive-bombers over on a daylight raid.

Moe Berg, he of the Ivy League pedigree but the baseball career, he of the nine spoken languages, he who was, until a week ago, at spring training as the catcher for the Chicago White Sox, now sat on an upended barrel in the basement of Davy Byrne’s public house on Duke Street in Dublin, clutching a brief case and flinching as another bomb went off close enough to shake the dust from the ceiling. Across from him was the woman. She was calling herself Charlotte this time. Charlotte Lynch. He wondered if she even had a real name. Moe’s passport said Paul Lynch, and she was posing as his wife. When the dust settled, he looked at her and smiled.

She shrugged.

It was going to get worse in Dublin, and soon. The Luftwaffe dropped flyers yesterday. White sheets of paper with the big swastika at the top and then, in English below, saying “Irish people! The day is approaching when we will free you from English oppression. Be prepared! Your English masters have chosen to remain in Dublin, leaving us no choice but to bomb them and come to your aid. Rise up with us when we come to free you!”

And below it was a cartoonishly fat Winston Churchill running away from bombs 48

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that were raining down on his head. To the side was an Irish mother, kneeling and weeping over her dead child.

Sure, it was childish propaganda. But Dubliners had been seeing those kinds of flyers for weeks, and then hiding every night from the bombings, and it was Moe’s best guess that they just might, in fact, rise up against the English army and its government-in-exile when the moment came.

There was another earth-shaking bomb, even closer, dust and brick falling to mix with the damp air in the basement to coat everyone and everything. That meant the Stukas were getting through the thin defenses of the remnant RAF, with its too few jets and Spitfires. The Nazis’ ME 262s, flying cover for the Stukas, had an easy time of it with the Spitfires and so outnumbered the RAF’s Gloster Meteors that all the merits of the English jets were nullified. It was a field day for the dive-bombers.

When would the invasion come? And where? These were just two of the things Moe needed to know, and as soon as this bombing came to an end for the day he might be able to find out. If the Shelbourne was still standing, and if Michael Collins would show up in the Horseshoe Bar as promised.

Another explosion, too damn close, rocked the building. There went another row of shops, or maybe Bewley’s Oriental Café, or maybe the American consulate, just around the corner on Nassau Street. The shop girl next to him on the right, still wearing her blue frock from whatever store where she’d been working, reached out to hold his hand. The look on her face was determination: she was absolutely not going to cry.

Moe felt sorry for her. Hell, he felt sorry for himself. This was not what he’d had in mind when he’d said yes to Wild Bill Donovan, head of the OSS.

There was the nasty scream of a Stuka, really close this time, and then you could tell from the sound that the dive-bomber had finished its run and dropped its bomb.

And then, a few seconds later, there was no noise at all but a sudden flash of light and then darkness.

February 28, 1940

In Cairo, Illinois

Baseball was a game of constant disappointment. You swing and you mostly miss.

You think it’s an easy grounder and it bad hops you. You’re called out at third trying to advance on a single. The pop foul to end the game drifts away from your glove as you reach over the rail. One thing after another, one game after another, one season after another; all of this in an endless progression of mediocrity and disenchantment.

No wonder he was depressed. Surely there were better things to do with one’s life than catch and throw and swing a stick at baseballs.

Moe Berg, M.S., M.A, Ph.D., LL.D., was a well-educated man, a scholar, a man of great promise. Yet here he sat, a baseball player, in the dugout at rickety old Egypt-ian Field in Cairo, Illinois, in the fourth inning of the first game of wartime spring training, watching the rain fall and gather into puddles atop the tarp that covered the infield.

With a losing war being waged in the Pacific and a shaky armistice with Germany in the Atlantic, times were difficult on the home front. The president thought baseball was good for the morale of the nation, sure, but appearances mattered, so Kene-saw Mountain Landis, the commissioner, had decreed that no team could travel farther west than the Mississippi or farther south then the Ohio River for spring training. Cairo was at the spot in deep Southern Illinois where those two great rivers met, so the Chicago White Sox had gone as far south as they could. It just wasn’t far enough, that was all.

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At least here it was rain coming down, Moe thought. It was probably snowing hard in Chicago right now. And here, in the South y’all, with Kentucky just the other side of the Ohio, tomorrow was supposed to be better, sunshine and fifty degrees. One could hope.

Moe was thinking about the war. In Japanese-held San Diego, U.S. Marines were dying every day as they laid siege to the city and tried to muscle their way back in.

The Japs had the airbase and the port, though, and the U.S. Pacific Fleet was a shadowy remnant of itself after the losses at Pearl, so it was slow going. Most people were worried, in fact, that San Francisco might be the next city to unhappily join the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Empire had its big carrier fleet out there somewhere, and that made everyone nervous.

In the Atlantic, the Germans swore they were happy with their united Europe and had no ambitions in North America, but if you believed that then Moe had a bridge he’d like to sell you.

So America was arming up, drafting every able body it could find, turning the car factories into tank producers and building a war machine that would be able to hold both coasts against the Axis.

And here Moe Berg sat, with flat feet and a heart murmur, still playing baseball, a kid’s game. It was shameful.

The puddles rippled in the wind, tiny oceans getting wider by the second. It had been raining steadily for a half hour and then moments ago there’d been a bright bolt of lightning and an immediate and massive crack of thunder. And now it was really pouring. Surely the game would be called in the next few minutes. Moe stood up from the dugout bench and walked up the well-chewed wooden steps that led to the field. He held out his hand to feel the rain, then poked his head out to take a look at the stands. Nearly empty except for one man under an umbrella in the box seats to the right of the dugout. Moe knew him, he realized. Donovan. William Donovan.

“Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the new OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the spy service for the U.S. military machine.

And a lot of memories came tumbling back. Moe remembered Zurich and Werner Heisenberg, Mount Palomar and that big mirror, the mystery woman who ran the whole thing somehow as she and Moe jumped around from one reality to another.

She was the one who’d really taught Moe how to play the spy game as well as the ball game. That damn zeppelin in Switzerland. A whole different life. A spy.

The game was called, sure enough, and they all trudged down the tunnel from the dugout to the clubhouse and there they started to strip off their uniforms, banging the spikes together to get out the muddy clumps that came with a wet field, unbuttoning their wool jerseys, unrolling the sanitaries and the pants legs: the whole ritual of a ballplayer after a worthless afternoon playing a kid’s game that was just for practice anyway. All he could think was that it wasn’t practice right now in San Diego, and it wouldn’t be on the East Coast, either, whenever Hitler decided to make that play.

Moe kept his eye on the clubhouse door as he got down to his underwear and the supporter with the cup. Sure enough, just as soon as he stood up to pull that off, the door opened and in walked Wild Bill Donovan. Moe, naked, stood there as Donovan walked over and reached out to shake his hand. Moe took it, shook, and then gestured at the wooden-slatted folding chair and Donovan smiled and sat down.

“Mr. Donovan,” Moe said. “Nice to see you again.”

“And you, Moe. You remember me?”

Moe wrapped a thin white towel around his waist, sat down on the other chair, said, “Yeah, it all came back to me when I saw you out there. The whole thing, the training, the missions, the woman.” He paused, “Where is she? The woman.”

“Still working with us, Moe. Or maybe we’re working for her. In fact, she must be why I’m here. I’m not sure, otherwise.”

50

Rick Wilber

Asimov’s

“Asimov’s has been my favorite science fiction magazine to read and then to write for since its first issue, which came out when I was just beginning to seriously think about fiction writing as something I might be able to do. My first sale was in 1988—a piece called ‘Suffer the Children’ that wound up being the start of a number of stories featuring an alien mercantile empire that comes to Earth to milk it for profit. Most of those tales appeared in Asimov’s and now are at the heart of a trilogy about the S’hudonni that I’m writing for Tor Books.

“My other major interest in writing revolves around baseball, where I’ve enjoyed a great deal more success as a writer than I ever did as a player, though I had a terrif-ic personal coach to teach me the game. My father, Del Wilber, played for the Cardinals, Red Sox, and Phillies and later managed in the minor-leagues for many years. He died some years ago, but I can still hear his voice coaching me as I write about the game. At least eight of my stories in Asimov’s have had baseball as a significant element.

“Between the S’hudonni stories and the baseball stories, Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine and wonderful editors Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams have been huge-ly important to my career. I owe them both a great debt, and I’m delighted to have a chance during the fortieth anniversary year to say ‘Thank you!’ to both of them.”

—Rick Wilber

Moe smiled. “I know, I know. It’s complicated.”

Donovan took out a cigarette. Didn’t bother to ask if it was okay, but lit it, took a long drag, blew out the smoke, “You know, I’d forgotten it all, Moe. The whole thing was wiped out. I had all these other problems on my mind. But I happened to be in St. Louis to meet with an aircraft design team and when I finished that and got to Union Station for the train down to New Orleans I read that you were having spring training here in Cairo. So I got off and thought I’d come see you. Save me a trip later.”

“A trip later?”

“That’s what I was thinking, Moe, before it all came back to me. I know all about you, all those languages you speak, that Ivy League education and all that. And I know about that heart murmur, too. I thought what the hell, it’s right on my way, and we’ve had our eye on this guy, you know?” Moe nodded. He did know.

“And then when I sat down here it started coming back to me, Moe, the whole thing.”

“And then you had it all, right? The memories?”

Donovan took another long pull on the cigarette, turned his head to blow out the smoke so it wasn’t right in Moe’s face, said, “Yes. All of it, and more, Moe. I have a job for you. Another important one. Think you might be interested? It means going east, not west.”

“Hitler? I suppose you don’t believe the peace will hold, right?”

“You know, Moe, people love the guy. People right here in America they love the guy. Lindbergh. Henry Ford. Lots more. Big money, the little guy, women, kids. Millions of them. They think he’s just what we need.”

“You don’t?”

“I think he’s a gasbag with big tanks and fast planes and a lot of bombs.”

“Yeah,” said Moe. “That’s sort of how I see it, too, Mr. Donovan.”

“And there’s rumors, Moe; bad rumors. You know he hates the Jews. Your people.

He blames all his troubles on them. Now he won’t let them work and blames them for that. My sources say he’s started rounding them up, Moe. He’s going to put them in some kind of camps, and god knows what hell those camps will be.

“Well, we think there might be a way to slow him down, Moe, but it’s risky.”

“I’m not surprised,” Moe said, “it’s always risky. Listen, Mr. Donovan, you don’t need to convince me. Just tell me what you need and I’ll do it, all right.”

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Donovan smiled. “It’ll be a little tricky, Moe, but it will change everything. There are a lot at of lives at stake. You in?”

“Yeah,” Moe said to Wild Bill Donovan, “I suppose I am.”

March 1, 1940

In the Algonquin

Orders in hand, Moe took the night train alone from Chicago to New York, riding first class in a sleeper. Moe liked trains the way he liked hotel rooms. He’d spent his whole adult life living in one or the other, a baseball vagabond. He felt comfortable, and there was the odd feeling in the Pullman that he was relaxing, but getting work done at the same time. He had time to think. You don’t get that in baseball, where your mind is filled with nothing but the games, especially when you’re a catcher. You go through the memories of the last game and your plans for the next one, and this goes on and on for months. And you do it for years, with that time off in the winter to do the banquet circuit, or tour Japan, or play winter ball in Cuba. He loved the game, did Moe; and until Wild Bill Donovan had come along he’d never found anything half so interesting to him as playing baseball. But now, this. This was worth missing a week or two of spring training, that was for sure.

Moe sat on the plush seat, pulled down the writing table, turned on the lamp, and got to work reading through everything and committing it to memory. As the train came into Grand Central at noon the next day everything important had been read, learned and burned, the ashes scattered out the open window between cars. So, all Moe had with him other than his Beretta and his clothes was the formal agreement that had to be signed by Michael Collins. That was the first thing he had to get done on this little expedition. There was more to do after that, too. A lot more.

Moe had a few hours to kill in Manhattan before taking a taxi out to Port Washington on Long Island, where he’d meet up with the woman and they’d board the Yankee Clipper to head to Ireland. He decided to enjoy himself, since he was on the government’s tab and the assignment was a dangerous one. Eat, drink, and be mer-ry. The Round Table at the Algonquin would work for a long lunch, and he could sit in that nice lobby afterward until it was time to go. He knew the people at the Algonquin and liked them, and they liked him.

He carried his valise with him in one hand and the briefcase with the documents for Collins in the other, and walked to the hotel from Grand Central. It was a sunny, warm day for March, little remnants of packed snow slowly melting in the shaded corners of the alleys and the streets wet with dark slush that would be gone by the afternoon. It had to be fifty degrees or so. Hell, a lot nicer than the weather in Cairo, Illinois.

He took the long way, down 42nd Street to Sixth Avenue. It’s a short walk but he planned to make it take twenty minutes. He was in no hurry; the valise was light and the briefcase weighed next to nothing and he was going to be cooped up in that plane for nearly twenty hours.

It turned out he got a little more exercise than he bargained for. Crossing Fifth Avenue by the library, he got that little tickle that someone was tailing him. When he got back on the sidewalk he stopped to buy a magazine so he could take a look around. There was a guy, wearing a leather jacket and gabardine pants, walking nonchalantly across the street, dodging the cars. Moe had seen him a couple of blocks away, too. He sort of stood out with that fly-boy jacket.

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the Kempeitai, if they’d finally figured out how important Moe had been to U.S. intelligence about Tokyo and Nagasaki.

Well, he had a few hours to shake the guy, so that shouldn’t be too hard. Moe left the magazine stand and walked right into the Howard Building behind him. Went over to the elevators and got in one. “Fifth floor,” he told the operator, who nodded, said, “Yes, sir,” and closed the door and the grate and got them moving upward.

Moe got out there and it was a long corridor with off ice doors all along it. He walked down that hallway, found the stairs at the far end, went back down the steps to the ground floor, and got out of the building that way.

He did this three more times in other buildings, always slowly working his way toward the Algonquin, and by the time he got there, a good half hour later, he was convinced he’d shaken the tail.

He walked in, headed to the Round Table Room, and was greeted cheerily by the maître d’, who called him by name and took him to a nice table for two over in a corner, where Moe could keep an eye on who might come into the restaurant.

The leather jacket never showed and Moe had a decent steak, rare, with a baked potato and a cup of coffee, black and strong. He dawdled, spending as much time as he could at the lunch, and then paid up and walked back into the lobby. Still no leather jacket, so he set the valise down next to a comfortable chair, picked the Times off the rack of papers, and came back to sit down and relax for a couple of more hours, reading and doing the crosswords.

Later, he walked out the rear entrance to the Algonquin, down an alley to 45th Street, turned left and walked to Sixth Avenue and hailed a taxi. Forty-five minutes later he was at the dock, where the big Boeing 314 Yankee Clipper flying boat was being fueled and the passengers were in the small, comfortable terminal, drinking coffee or something stronger, and anxious to get going. The woman was there and he sat down next to her and said hello. He’d seen her before and remembered it all; but would it work that way again? Would she know him? It had all gone differently this time, the woman hadn’t been at the game and Moe had traveled here on his own.

The woman knew him. After he sat down she leaned over, put a hand on his knee, and said, “We have a lot to talk about, Moe.”

“We do,” he agreed. “And plenty of time for it, too.” He was thinking about a long train ride he’d had with this woman, and how they’d made love winding their way through the Rocky Mountains. He didn’t make love often, and that had really meant something to Moe. Later, on that mission, he’d gotten the idea it meant a lot more to him than it did to her.

But here she smiled, and just like that everything was fine. It was hard to figure out their relationship exactly, but then, for Moe, all relationships were hard to figure out, so this was nothing new.

The important thing was he could feel all the cogs fitting together here just like they should. They worked well together, the two of them. When he was with her Moe knew his place in the scheme of things, knew he could get the job done, and knew she would, too. He was good with that.

March 2, 1940

In the Yankee Clipper

It had been a long but comfortable night and now, as the sun rose ahead and to port on the flying boat, the steward had folded up the bed and they were having breakfast, served by that same steward, now wearing a sparkling white coat. Eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, potatoes, and coffee. The food was excellent.

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They were traveling as a couple and had the passports to prove it: Mr. and Mrs.

Paul Lynch from Chicago. Newlyweds. They had wide, comfortable seats that con-verted into beds for the long stretch over the Atlantic.

The air was smooth except for a bumpy patch about halfway across that woke up Moe but not the woman. Moe didn’t like flying all that much. The steward, keeping an eye on things, saw that Moe was awake and brought him a whiskey, Irish, and that helped. It wasn’t long before he was back asleep.

Five hours later they came in for a dramatic landing on the Shannon, water spraying up all along the sides of the aircraft, and then there was a little sinking feeling and some swaying back and forth as the big plane—now a boat—settled in. Then they came into the pier and tied her off, all this while Moe was watching out the side window.

A few minutes later Moe and the woman, rested and fed, stepped out onto the pier and then into the Irish Free State passport and customs office to get their passports stamped. There was just one customs officer checking bags and he smiled, said “Céad míle fáilte,” with typical Celtic extravagance, and waved them through, just like they’d been promised he would. Those documents in the briefcase might have caused a stir if the guy had wanted to look at them, but he didn’t, and so they didn’t. Same way with the guns that both Moe and the woman carried, packed away in their bags.

Moe was thinking that the documents in there were going to please the Taoiseach, the prime minister of the Free State, Michael Collins. He was prime minister for the third time now. The Irish loved the guy, a real war hero from the Rebellion, and the guy who’d bargained their way to a kind of independence from the hated English.

That whole passport and the friendly wave customs took maybe ten minutes, and then Moe stopped at the bureau de change to change a few hundred dollars into Irish pounds—punts, they called them—and they were ready to go. A porter took care of their bags as they walked two blocks to the train station, where they would board the train and head to the Pale, that part of Ireland that was controlled by England. Essentially Dublin and its surrounding county, the Pale’s border with the Free State had been an open one for decades. But now, with the English government-in-exile occupying the city, the Pale had taken on new life as an enclave of England and the crown, and the Germans were, literally, taking aim at it. It was a dangerous place to be, but Moe and the woman had a job to do.

They walked down a promenade along the river, the Shannon so wide and calm here that it looked more like a lake than a river. “County Clare across the way,” said the woman, holding Moe’s hand like a newlywed with her left and pointing toward the low hills in the distance with her right. “And we’re in County Limerick here.”

“You’ve been here before? I should’ve asked that,” Moe said.

“An assignment,” she said, and turned to smile at him. He got the message; she wasn’t going to talk about that. No problem.

Then she took his hand in hers and walked along, bumping shoulders with him, seeming to be happy, as she said quietly, “There’s a guy across the street who’s tailing us. I’d like to get a better look at him.”

So they stopped walking and turned to look out over the river. “Kiss me, Moe,” she said. And he did, pulling her into him and swinging her feet off the ground until he was looking toward the river and she, kissing him, had her eyes open to look across the street.

The kiss might have gone on longer than needed, but eventually she pulled away, laughed loudly, said, “Oh, Paul, not in public!”

And Moe laughed loudly right back as they started walking again, hand in hand, toward the rail station, a couple of happy newlyweds.

She laughed, with a kind of high giggle that Moe hadn’t heard from her before, and then said, quietly, “I don’t know him, but he’s certainly tailing us.”

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“Leather jacket?” Moe asked

“No, a sport coat. He’s carrying a valise. Gabardine pants, black, a white shirt under the sport coat. Very country club. An American, I’m sure.”

“That guy who tailed me in New York? He wore black gabardine pants.”

“I know,” she said. “We’ll take care of this on the train, right?”

“Right,” said Moe.

They reached the station and boarded the train that was waiting for its passengers from the flying boat. The gabardine pants boarded, too.

About thirty minutes later, Moe had his chance. They were leaving Askeaton station when the guy went back to use the toilet, a small room that sat on the metal platform between cars.

Moe got up, too, put his arm on the woman’s shoulder, gave it a squeeze and walked back there himself. He’d take care of this.

He stood there, as if in a queue, until the guy came out. There was no pretense, the guy said “Hi, Moe. I guess this is it, then. You and me. Right now.” And the guy threw a haymaker aimed at Moe’s head.

Moe ducked it, stepped to the side and gave a quick jab to the face. Got it, and blood burst out of the guy’s broken nose. Moe jabbed again, but even with one hand rising to feel what his broken nose looked like, the guy slipped it, moving left. Then he jabbed back, and caught Moe on the cheek. It should have hurt, but didn’t; at least not yet.

Moe started to move left and the train jolted as they began to speed up on a stretch of straight track. The guy had his back against the toilet door and was steady. He took advantage of that to drive a fist into Moe’s ribs. Now that hurt.

Moe backed up, gasping for air. The guy moved in to finish him, and then the cavalry arrived in the form of the woman, who came in hard, shoved the guy back against that door again, then kicked him in the groin. He yelled in pain and bent over and the woman brought her knee up into his face. The guy slumped down.

The woman walked over to the door that led off the train, dropped the sliding window down, reached outside to grab the handle and opened the door. It swung wide.

Then she went over to the gabardine pants and grabbed him by the shoulders, half-stood him up—how could she be that strong? Moe wondered, watching—and pushed him out that door. He went flying out onto the track beds.

Moe saw she’d brought the man’s valise with her. He could breathe again, so he took a couple of steps, opened up the valise and rif led through it. Found a gun, a small Beretta, and took that out to add to his collection. Moe liked Berettas. Then he picked up the valise by the handles, walked over to the door, and threw it out.

“We wouldn’t want him to not have a change of clothes,” the woman said, straightening her blouse.

Moe looked at her and smiled. “Thanks,” he said. He’d figured her for the type who could handle herself and now she’d done exactly that. But maybe they weren’t done with that guy.

“If he lived through that, we’ll see him again, I suppose,” Moe said.

“I suppose so. But one thing at a time, Moe. Let’s just get to the Pale.”

Then they walked together back to their seats and sat down for the long ride to Dublin, the train stopping at every little village along the way.

March 3, 1940

In the Pale

The Pale was damn hard to get into. The English were watching all the rail stations and had all the roads into Dublin blocked, with nervous Tommies and their In Dublin, Fair City

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Sten guns standing at station platforms and each roadblock checking each person’s credentials and then letting them through one by one.

Their train ended at Kildare, a good thirty miles outside of Dublin, and from there they took a double-decker bus to Naas, where they stopped at the roadblock and waited for an hour to finally get through and head into the city center. It took them all day to get to their hotel, the Olympia on Dame Street, not far from Trinity College.

The bus ride from Naas to Dame Street had been surreal. In the space of a few miles they’d gone from the rural serenity of the Irish Free State to the chaos of wartime Dublin. It was a different world, an English world. Soldiers everywhere, military vehicles clogging the road, Spitfires and those new Gloster Meteor jets roar-ing by overhead on their way to tangle with the Luftwaffe over the Irish Sea in an attempt to slow down the bombings. Three times they went by sites where bombs had fallen, broken buildings, hollowed out by a direct hit in one case and the right half of a three-story building blown away in another.

But people walked the busy streets, and there were plenty of small trucks and cars and bicycles everywhere once they got into the city. The bus took them along the River Liffey, past the ruin of the Custom House and then across the only bridge still standing in that part of town. Once on the other side, they circled back up to Dame Street and their hotel. It was Moe’s first visit to Ireland, but he knew the song and was singing it in his head: “In Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty, I once met a girl named sweet Molly Malone.” Well, it wasn’t so fair anymore, and the girls and the boys both looked worried more than pretty. But Moe whistled it anyway and the woman, sitting next to him, smiled.

They checked in, and as the bellboy took their bags to their room, the front desk explained where the bomb shelter was and that they might need to go there at any time. Most of the bombings took place at night, but the Luftwaffe came in the daylight sometimes, too, she said. Best to be ready.

They settled in, took a walk around the city, ate a late dinner in the hotel restaurant, and climbed into bed. It was going to be a busy day tomorrow.

In the middle of the night, in total darkness with the blackout drapes closed, too, Moe woke to the sound of sirens and the deep throb of airplane engines, bombers. In a few minutes there was the whoomph of explosions, but none of them close. They were bombing the north side of the Liffey, sounded like.

The woman was awake, too, and they both chose to stay in bed instead of heading to the basement shelter. The woman turned on her side to face him and Moe turned too, to face her. They kissed, and then with the distant explosions and the sirens as background music, they made love. It was slow at first and then more energetic and it was about the best lovemaking Moe had ever had. When it ended, the woman kissed him on the nose, said “Thank you, Moe. You were very good,” and then turned away to get some sleep. Moe did the same.

March 5, 1940

In the Horseshoe Bar

It was dark, with little sweeps of light coming into the room. “Who’s down there?”

someone yelled.

“A lot of us,” Moe tried to yell back, but it came out a croak, his throat filled with dust, his eyes blinded by the dust and the darkness. He couldn’t see a thing, or hear much, or say much. A little bit of water might fix him right up, but that didn’t seem likely at the moment.

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yell another try, “Help,” he said, and it came out well enough. So, “Help. Over here,”

he said a little louder, and tried to move his right arm to wave it, but it was trapped under something.

Someone heard him, and the light from the flashlight—they called it a torch here—
came his way. He tried to wave the left arm and it was covered in something, a plank, and he was able to pull the arm free. He waved it. The light from the torch caught it and stayed, and that was how Moe got free from the rubble of the bombed-out pub.

He was okay. The garda—what the Irish called their cops—yelled something in Gaelic back toward some others and in a minute or two a young kid, skinny and all arms and legs, a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten, was scrambling over the debris to get to Moe with a canteen full of water. The kid had a miner’s cap on, with a candle in front of a small mirror on the front of it; dim, but it got the job done.

The kid splashed a little water on Moe’s face and wiped off the wet dust with his hand and then helped Moe drink and rinse and then spit the water out. That first sip was the best drink of any kind that Moe had ever had.

Then the kid slipped the canteen’s strap over his shoulder and set to work to free Moe, which turned out to be easier than you’d think. His right arm was trapped by some debris, but it moved aside if you pushed from behind, so the kid did that. And then Moe’s legs were under some paneling that had come down from the bar above them. Funny how the paneling was here but not the floor. The explosion must have sent stuff flying everywhere.

The paneling moved easily, too, when you had the right grip on it. Moe was lucky.

In a minute or two he was standing up. Nothing broken, and the kid said something to him. “Tá tú ceart go.”

Moe brushed his sleeves for a few seconds. Sure he was fine. Then he answered the kid with, “Beidh tú ag iarraidh ar mo cabhair a fháil ar na daoine eile,” telling the kid that he wanted to stay and help find the others.

The kid smiled at that, and then, together, talking in Irish when they needed to talk, Moe and the kid pulled out two more people, including the girl who’d been right next to Moe, holding his hand. She was in bad shape, but still alive. By then more people were there, including a pair of nurses, and they found three more after that.

Moe was relieved to find his briefcase in the rubble—that was the whole reason for being here in Dublin. But the woman was nowhere to be seen. Moe went right to the spot where she’d been sitting and there were no bodies there, no nothing. She’d found her own way out, that had to be it.

He looked some more, but there was no one left, the basement hadn’t been that big to start with. Moe, exhausted, f inally worked his way out and was startled to see bright sunlight. It was raining when he’d first gone into the pub. Now it was a very nice day and didn’t that beat all to hell.

Moe looked at his watch. Still ticking. Two-forty-f ive on a pleasant afternoon in Dublin. It wasn’t much of a walk to the Shelbourne, but Moe wanted to be there a little early. This was important, this meeting. He needed to get a signature on a piece of paper.

Moe headed up Duke Street, took a right on Dawson Street, and headed up to St.

Stephen’s Green. There he took a left and walked one block and there was the Shelbourne.

He stayed outside on the sidewalk for a minute, taking the time to pat himself down, getting rid of as much of the dust as he could. As he was at it, the doorman from the Shelbourne walked over with a hand broom, said good afternoon as if it was just another day, and took over the brushing.

Two minutes left, so Moe tipped the doorman, walked into the lobby, found the gents—the door said “Fir” on it, Irish for “Men”—and he walked in, set the briefcase In Dublin, Fair City

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on the counter next to him, and washed his face and hands to make himself presentable. Then he came out, walked across the lobby and into the Horseshoe Bar.

This was a famous place, this Horseshoe Bar in the Shelbourne. The martyred Éa-mon de Valera and Patrick Pearse and Countess Markievicz and James Connolly and Michael Collins and all the rest of the gang that had pushed so hard for full independence and failed at it had all sat in this bar to talk about their dreams for Ireland.

Most of those dreams hadn’t come true, but they’d plotted here, and now that’s what Moe Berg was doing. He walked up to the bar, ordered himself a pint of Guinness, and then, while it settled, he walked over to a small table in the corner and took a seat, setting the briefcase down behind his chair. At the next table, his back to Moe, was Michael Collins, prime minister of the Irish Free State. He was here, in the Pale, to try and hang onto what dignity the Free State had left in its capital, what with the English government-in-exile taking over since England’s defeat by the Germans.

Moe had glanced at him as he walked by to make sure it was Collins. It was. There were only six other people in the place, all of them English from their accents, and they didn’t seem to recognize Moe or Collins. Good.

The Guinness had settled. Moe walked back to the bar to get the pint, and the bar-tender winked when he handed Moe the beer, so he was in on it. That made sense.

Moe walked by Collins and sat back down. Collins was drinking a whiskey and a Guinness, which maybe said something about the difficulties he was having right now with Mr. Churchill, who’d lost none of his bluster though he’d lost the Battle of Britain.

From the safety of Dublin Castle he was telling everyone back in England to “Practice patience, and perseverance, and we will return.” Sure. Moe didn’t know if the English really believed in him anymore. He had a speckled history, after all, and now was as big a loser as old King Harold, who’d died with an arrow in his eye in 1066.

Collins, on the other hand, was still popular in Ireland. He’d kept them out of that losing battle and kept them neutral, and that had been a tricky dance to execute. So far, he’d been up to it, on the dance floor with three different partners.

He was every bit as big as they’d said, though he looked thin and pale. His hair was gray, his face lined. Leadership in these troubled times had worn him down since the picture Moe had seen that was a year or two old. He was dressed in a nice business suit with a green tie over a white shirt.

Moe picked up the pint and took a careful sip. “Better than the stuff at home,” he said to no one in particular. He wasn’t about to mention the name.

No one in particular said back, “You’re a little dusty, there, Mr. Lynch, but I’m glad you’re alive. I heard you’ve just had a close call.”

It was kind of a chuckle being named Lynch for this assignment. That was a good Irish name and Moe knew he didn’t look Irish and wondered why Wild Bill Donovan had chosen it. But, hell, the alias was the least of his worries now.

“Thanks,” Moe said. “I was lucky. Most of the others in that basement didn’t get off so easy. The Germans are beating up on your town pretty hard these days.”

Collins ignored his comment. It was a touchy subject, the Germans and their Luftwaffe. The Irish Free State was neutral in this war, and liked it that way. But the Irish Free State wasn’t really free at all. Not only were the ports run by the English as part of the original treaty; Dublin and its surrounding county—called the Pale by the Irish and the English both—had been shared territory with dual administra-tions, Irish and English. It was clumsy but it had worked. Now, though, the English ruled. Dublin was held by the English government-in-exile and the crown. Not far from here, up Dame Street in Dublin Castle, was Churchill and his gang, and somewhere else, probably just outside the city somewhere, was King Edward VIII and his American wife and their two children, nice and safe.

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German occupation, but only just. Back in England, across the Irish Sea, the whole country was under Germany’s thumb, and Wales and Scotland would be, too, as soon as the Germans bothered.

So, the truth was, Collins and most of the rest of the Irish were prone to sympathizing with the Germans, at least when it came to England. After a few hundred years under English rule, a lot of the Irish were probably looking up at those slow but deadly Stukas and the hordes of those fast jet planes, the ME 262s, and hoping one of their bombs landed smack on top of Winston Churchill and his gang. The Germans had promised not to invade if the Irish turned over Churchill and the rest, but the Irish couldn’t get them to budge, so the Germans were ratcheting up the pressure. Hitler said the King could stay, which said something about the King’s political inclinations. He’d been a Hitler apologist for years.

“Mr. Lynch,” Collins said. “Have your friends back home considered our offer?”

“First, why are we here in this bar?” Moe asked. “It’s a little public, isn’t it?”

“Yes and no, Mr. Lynch. Everyone in here is one of us, so it’s safe enough.”

“All right,” said Moe. “But we’ll need proof that you can do what you say you will. If you really have him, we’ll take him off your hands.”

“And the down payment? You understand I need to be certain of this.”

“What’s in my briefcase, there, will make it a certainty,” Moe said. It was good to know he could speak a little more freely. “You sign it and in a few days there’ll be one of our new submarine freighters rising up in Galway Bay, filled with what you need.”

Which was weapons, a lot of them, from Garand rif les to bazookas to light and heavy machine guns and mortars and, according to the paperwork Moe had brought with him, two Sherman tanks. The Irish planned to take care of Churchill on their own if he fled the Pale.

“And recognition of our new Irish Republic, Mr. Lynch?”

“That is my understanding,” said Moe. It wasn’t a hard call for the U.S. The armistice with the Germans meant the U.S. could focus its energy on holding back the Japanese. The invasion of Hawaii and the loss of those battleships and aircraft carriers at Pearl had scared the hell out of the military brass, so much so they’d abandoned San Diego when the Japanese arrived. Sure they’d saved a lot of lives that way, and the remnants of the Pacific Fleet. But it meant building up the forces in the rest of California and the West to try and take San Diego back. There wasn’t much to spare for any trouble in the Atlantic.

Moe had tried to warn them about Japan. He’d been on a winter baseball tour of Japan in 1934, just six damn years ago, and he’d seen how things looked there. Hell, he’d even taken pictures: battleships and aircraft carriers in Tokyo Bay, more ships at Sasebo and aircraft there, too, hundreds of them.

The Japanese loved baseball, and loved Moe Berg, since he spoke the language and openly liked the culture, so they gave him free rein, with nothing but one or two Kempeitai following him around. It was easy to ditch them when he needed to, and take the pictures he wanted. The Major Leaguers had spent a month there, touring around in busses and trains, playing ball in front of big crowds who seemed to love the Yanks.

Moe was still wrestling with the moral equation of how enthusiastic and friendly the Japanese had been with the American ballplayers then, and how vicious and cruel they’d been to the civilians in Honolulu just a few years later. Another reason, for sure, to abandon San Diego.

If nothing else, his month in Japan had convinced Moe that he was a better spy than he was a ballplayer, and for the first time he’d found something he liked to do even more than play baseball. On the diamond he was a big-leaguer, sure; but a mediocre one and he knew it. A decent catcher with a .220 lifetime batting average.

Weak bat, good glove, weak arm. That was the book on Moe Berg. But in the spy In Dublin, Fair City

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trade it turned out that he was very good, indeed; maybe even an all-star. It was a very different book, and he liked it. He just had to wait a few years to get his chance.

No one in particular said, “Mr. Lynch. A week ago we were contacted by someone in the German embassy here, a man I know and trust. He tells us that there is turmoil at the top levels of the German military. There is a new weapon, a superbomb.”

“I’ve heard about that,” Moe said. “I thought they didn’t have it ready yet.”

“This man says they do. And they plan to use it, even though the English are defeated.

The plan is to show America what this bomb can do, and force America to surrender.”

“And then go after Russia at last, I suppose,” said Moe.

“I suppose,” said no one in particular. “But the head of the German super bomb program has defected, with his family, and with the plans for that bomb. Powerful people on the German side have arranged for this.”

Werner Heisenberg was the man, Moe was certain, but didn’t say the name.

No one in particular said, “You should be at Banna Beach in Kerry at midnight on the seventh. You’ll meet the package there. You’ll need something big enough to carry four people plus yourself.”

“We’ll be there,” Moe said.

“Good,” said no one in particular. And “Okay,” said Moe. He took a sip of his Guinness. It was, in fact, a lot better than the pint or two he’d had in Chicago.

He sat back and listened as the man behind him picked up the briefcase, unclicked and opened it, pulled out some papers, glanced at them—too trusting, really; but it was exactly the wording everyone had agreed on—and then scribbled his name on two pages.

There was some more rustling of paper as he put one copy of the signed document in his jacket and the other copy of the signed document back into the briefcase, and then a click as he shut it.

Moe reached down with his left hand, found the handle of the briefcase and grabbed it, then rose, keeping his back to no one in particular, said “Go raibh maith agat as an comhrá beag,” and started to walk away.

No one in particular laughed at that and said, “Your Irish is no better than mine, Mr. Lynch. And one last thing.”

Moe stopped, turned around.

“Don’t be anywhere near Dublin on the eighth. The Irish? We’ll all be gone. You understand?”

The invasion? Or that damn superbomb? Either way, thought Moe, it was something he had to let Donovan know about. “Thanks,” he said to Michael Collins, in English, and then he gave Collins a wave and headed out the door of the Horseshoe Bar, then through the lobby of the Shelbourne and out onto the street and from there past the bombed-out pub and back in the direction of the hotel.

On the way there Moe stopped at a telegraph office and sent the news—coded, of course—to Donovan. Then he looked around. The street was busy, Dublin keeping up appearances. But it was mostly the displaced English he was seeing. The Irish who’d lived here were gone or getting out. He wondered how much time the English had left before the Germans came, and how that might change things. Might be, he thought, something he’d find out soon.

March 6, 1940

In Tralee

It was a lot easier leaving the Pale than it had been getting in. The English, waiting for an invasion that seemed certain to come any day, were on their guard for who might try to infiltrate their little corner of the island, but they didn’t really care who left.

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They’d come across the Irish Sea in big boats, small ones, slow planes and fast ones, all heading to the Pale, all hoping that the Irish Sea was wide enough to slow Hitler down and give them time to reorganize. A good three hundred thousand of them, many of them Royal Navy and RAF and Tommies; but tens of thousands of civilians, too.

Moe and the woman took that same local bus outward and got it all done in decent time. The roads were crowded, with cars and horse carts and buses and bicycles and people on foot: all Irish, all leaving the Pale. Moe wondered how busy these roads would be if and when the Germans invaded. All those English men, women and children trying to escape the Germans again, having done it once already. The whole island would be a mess, and the Germans would be tempted to seize control of the whole thing, he was sure.

Eventually they got back to the same train in Kildare, and changed trains twice to get to Tralee, a market town in County Kerry not far from Banna Strand, where they would meet Heisenberg and his family.

At least the Grand Hotel was a nice place in a good location. And they stumbled into the local Queen of the Rose pageant, with girls from all over the county vying to impress the judges. Moe and the woman were lucky to get a room at the hotel. And luckier even that it was a nice big one, with its own bathroom, a big bed, and a lovely view out over the town, bunting hanging everywhere, a big stage set up right below them on the wide boulevard of Denny Street, closed to cars for the duration of the festival.

They relaxed that evening. The sun was shining and the town busy and happy with the pageant, so the two of them had a good time pretending to be a happy couple in town to watch all the goings-on; the carnival rides, the food stands, the musicians fiddling away at jigs and reels on the big stage in front of a good crowd.

They ate dinner at Paddy Mac’s pub, just around the corner from the hotel, on Mall Street. They both ate shepherd’s pie, and then walked around some more to soak in the sights and sounds. They were keeping a wary eye out for trouble, especially trouble wearing gabardine pants. They didn’t see how the guy, if he’d survived that tumble from a moving train, could know they were here in Tralee; but it was worth it to stay alert. But they didn’t see him.

They slept well and made love again, chuckling about how they had to stick with their cover story about being newlyweds. Moe was about as happy as Moe Berg could be; doing important things for his country while he was with this incredible woman.

He told her that and she smiled, put her finger to his lips to shut him up, and then rolled over on top of him and that did, in fact, shut him up.

The next day they made their preparations. They needed transportation, for one thing. Some kind of Ford Transit truck or a big enough car that it could handle them all. Within the hour they saw what they needed, a Bedford HC van, built in England in better days and used for transport of people and their luggage. It seated eight if you squeezed, and had room for luggage in the rear. It sat on the side of the road, in front of a hedge, and behind the hedge was a stone cottage with a red door, the top half of it open to the breeze.

Moe walked up to the door with the woman and when they knocked on that door an elderly woman answered. They spoke in Irish and then switched to English, the elderly woman and Moe and his “wife,” who said “Call me Charlotte, please,” to the elderly woman. Her sons were all gone to America in the past three years, since the war began. Two to Boston and one to Chicago and God bless them but she missed them, so. She’d hung onto their van for all that time but money was tight, wasn’t it, so. And sure the boys wouldn’t be coming home to visit now, with all that was happening, and so it was time to part with it. Would twenty pounds be all right?

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shook on it, and Charlotte gave her a hug and then paid her in cash and she handed them the cert for the Bedford and off they went.

The Bedford was fine. It was a lot of money to use a vehicle for one long night, but the transaction was clean, so there’d be no garda looking for the van through the night. They drove it back into Tralee and it ran like a charm.

March 7, 1940

In the Dunes at Banna

A half hour before midnight they were up in the dunes at Banna Strand, the long wide beach stretching out in both directions, the bay in the front if you were looking west. Moe had the big flashlight—the torch—that they’d bought that day in Tralee.

Somewhere out there was a submarine, a German U-boat, that was about to rise to the surface, use its spotlight to flash four times toward the beach and wait for Moe to flash back three, and then Werner Heisenberg and his wife and kids would be climbing into an inflatable dinghy along with a couple of Kriegsmarine submariners to do the paddling and perhaps twenty minutes after that the Heisenbergs would step onto the neutral soil of the Irish Free State and by eight o’clock tomorrow morning they would be on that Yankee Clipper heading to America. And inside Heisenberg’s brain was the knowledge to build that superbomb, the one the Germans had and America didn’t. Yet.

It wasn’t the best possible night for this kind of thing; the moon was nearly full and so bright you could read a newspaper by its light. Moe, in fact, did just that thing, to prove to himself that he could.

A half hour later, right on time, there was a blinking light out in Tralee Bay. Four good flashes. The woman had the flashlight—the torch—at that point and pointed in the direction of the light they’d seen and flashed it carefully three times. Sign and countersign.

And then they waited. The moon was bright, sure, but the sea was dark and Moe was sure they’d be in a rubber dinghy that was dark, too, and they’d be wearing dark clothes. Moe and the woman wouldn’t be able to see them, probably, until they got within fifty yards of the beach or so.

They didn’t know who might be watching, and they wanted this to go as quickly and smoothly as possible, so Moe and the woman walked down through the tall dunes to the hard sand of the beach to be ready to meet the dinghy when it reached shore.

Their timing was good, and they saw the rubber dinghy when it was about thirty yards out, two submariners doing the paddling while the Heisenberg family sat in the middle.

The dinghy was only another minute or two from reaching the beach when Moe heard a strange kind of high-pitched whine. He held up his hand and listened.

“Jets,” said Charlotte.

Some of those new jets of the Brits, Moe wondered? Probably.

The whine changed its tune and Moe knew two or more of those new British jets were heading for them. “Run! Let’s go!” he yelled as the two sailors pushed the Heisenbergs over the side of the dinghy and tossed a few pieces of luggage after them and then they started madly paddling back out to their ship. Probably too late, thought Moe; surely the U-boat was already diving.

Moe and Charlotte scrambled out into the water to help Heisenberg and his family make it in. They were lucky it was only four or f ive feet deep when they’d been pushed overboard.

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like. The first one aiming at the submarine, or at least where it had been a minute ago, dropping some kind of depth charge that splashed, sank and then exploded.

Moe thought for a happy few seconds that it was the U-boat that was the target and not him and these people, but the second jet started a dive right at them, machine-gun bullets marching up the beach toward them.

It wasn’t the RAF after all, but the Luftwaffe, some of those ME 262s that had won the Battle of Britain.

The bullets missed them all, passing a good twenty or thirty yards up the beach from where they were, still in the shallows.

As the plane pulled up at the end of its run, Heisenberg yelled about his briefcase and pointed out, away from the beach. Charlotte headed that way, stripped down in seconds to her underwear and pushed through the water until it was deep enough to swim.

A second jet made its run and that one missed too, the marching machine-gun bullets at the top of the beach, nowhere close to where they all stood.

Then the jets left and Moe could see out in the bay when the U-boat surfaced and blinked the three flashes to say their job was done. Those two in the dinghy must have made it after all.

Moe took care of the Heisenbergs when they reached the beach. “We have towels for you in the van,” Moe told them, and pointed toward the narrow path between the dunes. The van was back in there, hidden.

“Herr Heisenberg,” Moe said in German, “I’m glad you are safe. We were very lucky, with those planes. Why didn’t they finish us off ?”

“Lucky, yes,” said Werner Heisenberg, quickly shaking Moe’s hand and then turning back to look out at the water. The woman was wading in. She had the briefcase in her hands.

“Oh, thank god,” said Heisenberg and walked back into the shallow water to take it from her.

She shook his hand, too, and handed him the briefcase, then they walked in together toward Moe. She smiled when they reached him. “It was floating, so I think whatever is in there is probably okay.”

Heisenberg opened it, reached in with one hand to feel around. Pulled the hand out, closed the clasp tight on the briefcase. “I think it is all right.”

“Dr. Heisenberg,” the woman said. “How’d you arrange those jets? We should all be dead.”

Heisenberg looked at her, and then at Moe. “The Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine. Everything is in turmoil, f ield marshals choosing sides, soldiers choosing sides. I’m sure they had orders to kill us and sink the U-438 that brought me here. But they have chosen their side, which is the side I am on, too, so they will say they sank the U-boat and killed us on the beach.

“What is happening now in Germany is terrible, Mr. Berg. Unthinkable, and yet it is happening. And now this bomb. He must be stopped. Many of us think this. And so I have brought you the tool to stop the madman.”

March 8, 1940

In Foynes

They spoke in German, Moe Berg and Werner Heisenberg, as Moe did the driving, weaving his way through the countryside on the narrow Irish roads in the moonlit night, heading from Banna to Foynes. At first he drove with the headlights off, thinking about those ME 262s coming back. After a half hour or so, and two close calls In Dublin, Fair City

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with the ditches that ran along both sides of the road, he decided that driving in the dark was the greater risk, so he turned on the lights and that helped.

It would take a couple of hours, at least, to get back to Foynes. But the ticketing wouldn’t open until five A.M., and it was just twelve-thirty, so they were in no hurry.

In the back, Charlotte was talking in German to Heisenberg’s wife, Elisabeth, and their ten- and six-year-old daughters. Moe hadn’t realized she spoke the language until he heard her use it. She sounded like a native, maybe from Munich.

As soon as they’d cleared the dirt entrance road to the beach and got onto some too-narrow pavement, Heisenberg started talking, in English now, unloading a lot of weight he’d been carrying around for a long time, Moe figured.

“There was another assassination attempt. It failed, like the others. And now they are blaming it on the Jews,” Heisenberg said. “No one believes that, of course. But now, with this bomb in the hands of that madman.” He shook his head.

Moe didn’t say anything, and Heisenberg went on: “He is insane, you know. He always has been. We laughed at him, called him a clown, a ‘Wichtigtuer,’ we called him.

A Pompous Ass.”

An apt description, Moe thought. You give a blowhard like that unlimited power and a military machine like no other and here’s what you get.

“He was always a clown, a liar,” Heisenberg. “Lies on top of lies. And the people didn’t care, the lies didn’t matter. The glory of the new Germany. The Fatherland!”

Moe nodded, said, “We watched from America and some of us wondered how you Germans could fall for that. But others of us, millions of them, think right now today that he’s doing good work. They like the guy.”

Heisenberg shook his head. “We voted for him. I voted for him. Such foolishness!”

“And you went to work for him,” Moe said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It was funding for our science. Fission. Energy. Free energy!”

“And a bomb, too.”

“Yes, and that bomb.”

Heisenberg patted the briefcase. “Your scientists in New Mexico and Chicago? Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Lawrence, and the others. This will save them a year of work, maybe more. And I will help. I am ready to help, if they’ll have me.”

Moe needed to know something. “What changed your mind?”

“War was one thing. But this bomb. And now what he’s doing to the Jews. What’s happening there is,” Heisenberg searched for the right word in English, “Horrifying.

To ruin them, such good people, such great scientists and artists and shopkeepers and Germans. Good Germans!”

“Our people don’t know about that. Will you tell them?”

“Of course! Speer tells me they are building camps for them, where they’ll be taken care of. ‘Taken care of.’ Do you know that means?” Heisenberg shook his head.

“Each step he took we thought it was the last. Now, I don’t know. Unconscionable. I had to leave. Someone has to stop him. If Oppenheimer and the others are close, then perhaps we can do that.”

“How many bombs did you make for him? And are they small enough to be on one of those rockets? Or in a bomber? I’ll need to cable that information to my people as soon as I can.”

Heisenberg said, “Just one. No, it is too large right now for an airplane to carry, too big for the rockets. That one will be used soon, a demonstration. I don’t know where.

There was talk of Dublin, a barge on the River Liffey and then the English are done for good. Perhaps you already knew this?”

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English that much? Destroy their own capital to wipe out the English. Madness, but maybe. Let the Germans do the dirty work.

“But in six months, a year at the most?” Heisenberg was saying. “Even without me there. Yes. Six months. And Goering is flight-testing a bomber—a jet bomber!—that can fly one way from Ireland to New York. The crew will drop the bomb, start back and then parachute down when the fuel is gone, to be picked up by a submarine. A simple plan. Six months. A deal with the Irish for an airbase, or crush them if there is no deal. And then the bomb on New York.”

“And then it’s all over,” said Moe. Well, that was terrible news, but now he knew.

Wild Bill Donovan wouldn’t be happy with this news, and you could bet there’d be quite a committee in New York to meet the Clipper when it landed.

“Yes,” said Werner Heisenberg. “And then it’s all over.” And he turned around in his seat to see how the children were doing as they drove on.

They got lost twice on the way. The moon set and the darkness deepened, and even in the Irish Free State there were enough worries over a possible invasion that all the signage had been removed. But eventually an old upright stone marker, half-hidden in the hedgerow at the side of the road, had set them on the right path. “Limerick 10,” it said on it and so they realized they were turned around completely, got it straightened out and within f ive miles found the crossroad for Foynes and they made the left turn, Moe wrestling with the gearbox to get the van into second and then into third as the road leveled out and straightened some, too, as they started to glimpse the Shannon off to the right, exactly where they needed it to be.

Fifteen minutes later they pulled into the small parking lot at the terminal building on the shore of the Shannon at Foynes. The woman and Elisabeth Heisenberg had to wake the two girls. It would be a great adventure, flying across the Atlantic to America.

The sun was rising behind them as they stood there, waiting for the porters to come out and help them with the luggage. It was a cool, wet morning despite the calendar and they could see their breath in the mist and light rain. It had been hot in Germany, and dry, the older girl said to the younger. Would it be hot in America, the younger sister asked her, and Moe smiled and said in German that, yes, it was hot in America. And did it rain very much? And Moe said, no, it didn’t rain very much.

And then, thinking of Los Alamos and the high desert, he added that in some places it hardly rained at all. The Heisenbergs, wife and husband, looked at him and smiled. They were prepared for that.

Still no porters. They could see the plane, or the back half of it anyway, docked behind the terminal building. A huge, beautiful beast that would take them all home.

But still no porters.

“I’ll roust them,” Moe said, and walked across the lot to the double-doored main entrance to the terminal. He got there, tugged open the door on the right, and walked into trouble.

A woman grabbed him and pulled him inside. She was dressed very nicely, all the way up to the hat with the sprig of flowers in it. But the gun in her right hand indicated that she wasn’t as nice as she looked. She shoved it into his ribs and pulled him out of the view of those outside the doors.

“Hello, Moe,” said the gabardine pants, back from the dead, the whole right side of his face red and bruised. He was in his leather jacket now, his left arm in a sling; but the right hand holding a gun, a Luger. German. He spoke with that f lat Midwest American accent, so a Yank, or awfully good at languages. “We’re so glad that you’ve f inally arrived.” He smiled, made a little joke that Moe knew he’d been waiting to say. “We regret to inform you that your flight is going to be delayed.”

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Moe looked around. The other passengers were there: A priest: no, a bishop, those red threads at the end of his sleeves. A woman next to him, attractive, so that was interesting. A few obvious business-types in suits, a few American military in uniform, all of them officers. There weren’t many, what with wartime and the price of the flight.

Where was the crew? Moe didn’t see a pilot or any stewards or those missing porters or the radio operator or flight engineer. None of those, so that was a dozen or more missing.

And could there really be just two of them holding everyone hostage here? Might there be more outside, or in the plane?

All this in a quick glance. And then, “What’s the plan, pal?” asked Moe, who hadn’t raised his hands and had his own gun in a shoulder holster under his suitcoat.

“I’m afraid that we’re going to have relieve you of your friends and their luggage, Moe. They’ve fled with property that belongs to the Reich. It’s our job to return that property to its proper owner, and to return the Heisenbergs, as well. They’ll be tried.”

“And executed,” said Moe.

“That’s likely.”

The guy’s accent sounded Chicago to Moe. He certainly recognized those stretched out “o” and “a” sounds. That explained it. The Bund, or more properly the German American Bund: Amerikadeutscher Bund. Big in Chicago, thousands of them, maybe a lot more, all great admirers of Hitler and the Nazi Party. Among those Americans who thought Hitler was just fine. A strong hand on the tiller, revitalizing a nation and all that. They were looking, these millions, for someone like that in America.

Someone to clean up the mess that came from uppity Negroes who didn’t know their place and the Jews who had a stranglehold on the nation’s money, and the women, thousands of them, who were marching around for equal pay.

“You take your orders from the Bund or Berlin?” Moe asked him, trying to buy a little time. It wouldn’t take long for the woman to know something was up when Moe didn’t come right back out. And she was deadly when she wanted to be. Moe had seen her in action.

The guy smiled and shook his head. “You tell me, Moe Berg. Baseball player. Spy.

Jew. You seem to know everything.” He waved his Luger. “Come with me now, Moe.

Let’s go out and meet your friends so I can take a few of them off your hands. With what’s about to happen, we wouldn’t want them flying off to America.”

The guy was a bully. Probably always had been a bully, always shoving people around. If he was back home he’d be wearing black pants and a brown shirt and beating up any Jews he could f ind. But he wasn’t home. He was here, in the Irish Free State, and Moe wasn’t about to be bullied.

The front door’s top glass half exploded with a bullet coming through it and the gabardine pants was hit somewhere in his right side. Moe had pulled his Beretta from its holster and was firing immediately at the woman with the other gun. She was expecting it, and fired at him at the same moment. Moe felt the slug hit him in the left arm, up high, and had a sudden crazy thought that this might mean he wouldn’t be able to play ball for a while. But he felt dizzy with the pain, and stood there, the Beretta suddenly feeling very heavy in his hand, and then it fell to the floor.

She’d been hit in the chest, it was a wonder it hadn’t killed her outright; but she walked over, slowly, and took aim at Moe’s head and put both hands on the trigger to make the pull when, instead, there was another crack of a shot and a bullet took her in the neck, going straight through and exiting on the other side, bringing a lot of blood and spray with it. Moe was watching as she staggered, dropped her gun and started to reach for her neck and then, instead, collapsed on the floor.

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there on the floor, stunned. The woman with the gun was dead. Charlotte—did she know he had a thing for her? Did she know he thought she was the most wonderful woman he’d ever met? That he loved her?—came over and looked at his wound, said

“Moe, it’s not too serious, it winged you.”

She pulled out her blouse, ripped off a strip of it, wrapped it around the wound and tied it tight, said “Press hard on that, all right?” and then picked up her gun. “I’ll clean this up,” she said, and left to head through the far door and out to the Yankee Clipper. There must be more trouble out there.

The pain wasn’t too bad. Moe stood up and felt all right. He couldn’t let her handle that alone, damn it, but the Bund guy was starting to rise. The front door opened and Werner Heisenberg walked in. He, too, had a gun, a Beretta that Moe had left in the van. But it wasn’t pointing at Moe.

“Keep an eye on him?” Moe asked in German.

“With pleasure,” said Heisenberg back, in English and walked over to kick the guy’s gun clattering away into the far corner of the room. “Please,” he said to the Bund guy, “do something that will allow me to kill you.”

Moe smiled at that. Good. And then headed toward the back door and whatever needed to be done back there. He heard a gunshot and tried to move more quickly, but when he got there it was all over. One more dead member of the Bund, and some shaken up aircrew. Otherwise they were fine. And Moe knew that they had to get going, get into the air as soon as they could.

A half hour later the Yankee Clipper’s big Cyclone engines started up and the plane pulled away from the pier and headed out onto the Shannon. Moe and the woman sat on the left side of the plane, the Heisenbergs on the right side. To take off into the wind they’d have to make their run straight east up the Shannon, so they taxied out, turned and the engines roared as the Clipper built up speed and, at one hundred miles per hour, lifted off the water and became an airplane again.

Moe had sent a telegram to Michael Collins and another one, longer, to Wild Bill Donovan; but he didn’t think there was much anyone could do about what might happen.

Sure enough, as they started to bank left to head out across the estuary and the Aran Islands below there was a blinding flash of light in the distance, to the north-east, where Dublin, fair city, where the girls were so pretty, used to be.

Moe watched as Werner and Elisabeth Heisenberg saw the bright flash of the bomb going on and watched as the cloud of smoke rose and rose and blossomed outward.

Heisenberg stared over at Moe. “Six months,” he said, and Moe nodded. The woman reached over to take his hand, squeeze it. “They’ll get it done, Moe, I’m sure of it.”

Moe looked at her. Nodded. “Sure,” he said, to her and Heisenberg both. And then he sat back against the headrest and closed his eyes. It was a long f light to New-foundland and then to home in New York. Six months. ❍

In Dublin, Fair City

67

Jack McDevitt is the author of twenty-two novels, twelve of which have been Nebula finalists, and more than eighty short stories. Seeker won the Nebula award for best novel in 2007.

In 2003, Omega received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science fiction novel. Jack also won the Georgia Writers’ Association Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. He has received various other honors. Most recently, the International Astronomical Union named an asteroid for him.

The author’s latest books are Coming Home, an Alex Benedict novel, and Thunderbird, both from Ace. Alex and his partner Chase Kolpath are antiquity dealers living in the far future.

They specialize in solving historical mysteries. Another popular character has been Priscilla Hutchins, a starship captain during the tempestuous early years of interstellar flight. She is usually caught up with unexpected discoveries. Cryptic, a best-of collection of his stories, is available from Subterranean Press.

Jack has been a naval officer, an English teacher, a customs officer, and a taxi driver. He has also conducted leadership and management seminars for the U.S. Customs Service. He is married to the former Maureen McAdams, and resides in Brunswick, Georgia. In his poignant new tale, two complex characters engage in . . .

THE

LAST DANCE

Jack McDevitt

“Olivia,” I said, “are you really there?” It had been a year and a half since that terrible evening when she’d started home from the hospital where she worked as a nurse. She’d gone just two blocks when the tractor-trailer rear-ended her. Left her dead on the scene.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m back. Modern technology is something else, isn’t it, Ethan? It’s good to see you again.”

We were in the den, both on our feet. She was standing in front of her favorite 68

Asimov’s
armchair, the electric one that allowed her to lower the back and sleep in it. A photograph from our wedding was mounted on the wall directly behind it, and pictures of our daughter Sarah and my mom stood atop a bookcase. Outside, a soft rain fell into the trees. I couldn’t stop staring at her. I knew exactly what was happening, but nevertheless it came as a shock. Behind me, the guy from Celestial Communications asked if she was okay.

“Yes,” I said. “She’s incredible.”

He was short and overweight. I forget his name. He handed me a copy of the contract. “The system will do an ongoing analysis of conditions in the household and will respond accordingly.” He smiled. “You might even come down some morning and find yourself waiting to give you some advice.”

“Myself ? You can really do that?”

“Well, it doesn’t happen often. But yes, sometimes it’s necessary. Some people need to hear truth from themselves.” He produced the bill. It was higher than I could really afford, but I’d manage. Having Olivia back was priceless. I looked over at her.

She was still watching me. “Give me a second, love. I’ll just be a minute.” I sat down at the coffee table and wrote a check.

When I returned to the den, she’d settled into the chair and was sitting with her eyes closed and the happy smile that I knew so well. “I could almost believe you’re her,” I said.

The eyes opened, blue and soft in the light of the single lamp. “I am her. I’m Olivia in every way that matters.”

“Except physical.”

“I’m sorry about that, Ethan. I really am. Not much we can do about it. Not yet anyway. I understand the technology is coming.” It was her voice. And the tenderness it conveyed was all too familiar. “I’m sorry about what happened.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said.

“He was too close behind me. I should have realized. Shouldn’t have tried to stop at the light.”

I wanted to go to her, embrace her, hold onto her. In another time she’d have thrown herself into my arms. Instead we reached out cautiously to each other, until our fin-gertips would have touched. But they couldn’t. Her physical self was no longer there.

Nevertheless, according to Celestial, it was Olivia who sat smiling at me. She had her memories and her personality, her habits and her passions, to the extent they’d been able to extract them from MyPage. And from me. And from whatever other sources had been available. However they’d done it, they’d constructed a perfect replica.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this isn’t easy for you. It isn’t easy for either of us.”

“Olivia, I’ve never been able to accept that you’re gone.”

“I’m not gone, Ethan. I’m here. If you can hold onto that reality, life will become much easier for you.”

“What about Sarah?” The sales people had assured me that accepting the avatar wouldn’t be a problem for my eight-year-old daughter. That she would adjust. It will take some time, they’d said, but she’ll be okay.

“She’ll be fine. You and she are the only things that matter in my life.”

I tried to tell her that I was grateful she was there, but I couldn’t help recalling that final goodbye at the cemetery. I wanted to say something, God knows what, but my voice broke.

She waited while I pulled myself together. Then: “I understand, Ethan. Be aware that I’m an almost perfect match. And if it helps, I love you. As she did.”

“I love you too, Olivia.” I meant it. Somehow. I understood the reality, that I was talking to software. But for the moment, it didn’t matter. We were together once more, at home, after nineteen painful months.

The Last Dance

69

November/December 2017

“I can feel it,” she said. “I’m anxious to see Sarah again.”

“She’ll be home from school in about a half hour.”

“I know. Ethan, I can’t tell you how it feels to be back with you.”

“Is that really true? Do you actually have feelings?”

“Of course I do.”

I lowered myself onto the sofa and just stared at her. That soft chestnut hair falling to her shoulders, the alluring lips framing her unforgettable smile. My God, I wanted to take her in my arms. And never let go. “I’m just not sure this is a good idea, though. For Sarah. Seeing you again after everything that happened is going to come as a shock.”

“Just leave it to me, Ethan. I’ll handle it. You’ve told her about this, so she knows what’s coming. She’ll be f ine.” When family issues got serious, Olivia’s eyes inevitably grew intense. The laser vision that I’d seen before at critical moments showed up now. It had been there the night we’d taken Sarah to the hospital with a hundred and five temperature. And when Olivia decided I was taking the job at the gym primarily so I could ogle a few of the clients. And when we got the news that my mother had died. She’d also gone too soon, like Olivia the victim of an automobile accident. “That’s the real problem, Ethan, isn’t it? You aren’t buying that I’m actually here, that I love you as she did, that I’m ecstatic to have you and Sarah in my life.

You probably don’t even believe I have a life. But I do. And no, we can’t bring the original Olivia back, but if she had known about this technology, she’d have wanted you to do exactly what you’ve done.”

She was wearing the golden slacks she’d had since our earliest days together, and a white cotton blouse that I’d given her at Christmas a few weeks before everything had gone wrong. “So you have no problem with Sarah?” I said.

“None. The research indicates that the vast majority of people who accept the program, especially children, are much better off in the long run.”

“Okay. Let’s hope they’ve got it right.”

“There’s something else I should tell you. It probably hasn’t occurred to you, but I need to see her.” Her voice trembled. “I miss Sarah.”

“How is that possible, Olivia? I mean, you’ve never really met her.”

A tear ran down her cheek. “I’ve seen her. And I have all the emotions and memories of your wife.”

“Incredible. I almost think you are Olivia.”

“I am.”

“She’ll be so happy to see you again. I’m just worried that—”

“Leave it in my hands.” She bit her lower lip as she always did when life became difficult. “How are you doing, Ethan?”

“I’ll survive.”

“Stay clear of tractor-trailers.” It was supposed to be a joke, but it didn’t work and she knew it before she’d finished. I sat down beside her and waved it away. We talked about old times, about the night I’d called her shortly after we’d met and we’d gone for a walk through Arcadia Park. And about the bikini I’d given her for her birthday that she’d refused to wear. And our first date and how we wished we could return to it and do it again. On that magnificent evening we’d gone downtown to listen to Ben-jamin Grosvenor play Mozart and Rachmaninoff. “After that night,” she said, “I knew I wouldn’t let you get away.”

I don’t know how she was aware of that. Olivia told me that story at our wedding, and I can’t imagine her having told it to anyone else.

The school bus pulled up. “That’s her now,” I said.

I was waiting at the front door when Sarah came in. She was in third grade and 70

Jack McDevitt

Asimov’s

“I was a customs officer in North Dakota during the late 1970s. The station was located in Pembina, a quiet town with a population of about six hundred, surrounded by generally frozen plains and empty space. I’d been a big fan of Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder during my early years. But I’d drifted away from science fiction by the time I arrived on the Canadian border. Consequently I was delighted to hear about Asimov’s. I’d forgotten how dazzling SF could be, and my first thought was that it was simply my youth that had brought the magic. After all, what was the big deal about Martian deserts and Saturnian rings? But I needed something more for those late cold nights. And somehow Asimov’s brought it all back.

“It did more than that. It reminded me of a long-lost ambition to write SF. To indulge myself in lost worlds and interstellar travel. Shortly after its appearance I was writing again, something I hadn’t attempted since my college years. By 1982 one of my stories, ‘Ancient Shores,’ showed up in the magazine, and I knew I was on my way.”

—Jack McDevitt
clearly her mom’s daughter. She had Olivia’s eyes, her soft brown hair, and her re-lentless energy. She said hello, dropped her schoolbag by a footrest where she usually left it, and fell into a chair. “Long day?” I asked.

“Boring.” Sarah was of course accustomed to talking with AI’s. She loved carrying on a conversation with Jerry, the house. And she was always telling our car to look out. So I started by explaining that we had another one inside that she could talk with.

Her face brightened. “The one that impersonates Mommy?” She gave me a weak smile, suggesting that she wasn’t buying it.

But when she entered the den and saw Olivia, she screamed and charged across the room into her mother’s arms. “Look out,” said the avatar as her image collapsed.

I got Sarah off the floor and Olivia was back again, bending over the child. “You’re still too quick for me,” she said. “I’m sorry, Sarah. I knew that was coming. You just move too fast.”

“Mommy, is that really you?”

“I’ve taken her place, Sarah. And yes, I’ll be with you the same as she would.”

“Oh, Mom, it’s so good to see you again.” She’d begun to cry and laugh simultaneously.

“I feel the same way, Sarah. I wish I could hug you, but that’s the one area I can’t make happen.”

“I understand, Mom.”

“And I want you to know I’ll be here whenever you need me. Whenever you want to talk.”

“But you’re not real, are you? You’re not much different from Jerry, right? Except that I can see you.”

Olivia hesitated. “I love you, Sarah. And I’m real.”

Tears were running down Sarah’s cheeks. She wiped them away, said something I couldn’t make out, turned and left the den. I followed and asked if she was okay.

“Daddy, when you first told me about her, I didn’t think it could actually happen.”

She waved me to leave her alone and retreated into her bedroom. Moments later, I heard her TV come on.

I went back to Olivia. She was standing by the sliding glass door that opened into the backyard. There was a glimmer of lightning, and thunder rumbled in the distance. “She okay?” she asked.

“I think you’re going to take a little getting used to.”

“I’m sorry.” She was still looking out at the sky. “This is a tricky business.”

“She doesn’t understand. Or I guess she does. Maybe that’s the problem.”

“Give it time. In the end, she’ll be better off.”

“You’re not just saying that to protect Celestial, are you?”

The Last Dance

71

November/December 2017

“No, Ethan. I don’t think your wife ever lied to you. And I won’t either.”

Sarah kept her distance after that during those first few weeks. When she walked into a room where Olivia was present, she said hello. Sometimes she went a bit further and added a comment about the weather, or how school was going, but otherwise, she remained withdrawn. Olivia asked me to be patient, and explained that adapting would take time.

For me, the passions of earlier years returned in full force. Olivia was back again and that was what mattered. We could sit quietly and watch the old TV shows that we’d always enjoyed. At night we could walk through the backyard almost hand in hand while we joked about what our neighbors, the Prescotts and Martins, would think if they saw us. I hadn’t informed anyone, because I had no idea how the experiment would play out. The important aspect was that it came together and took me to a happier time.

Eventually the people in our lives learned about Olivia. I don’t know whether they saw her, or whether Sarah told them. I asked her not to say anything, but that was a heavy burden to place on a third grader. No one seemed surprised. The technology had been in the media for weeks. Everybody wanted to know whether we were being invited onto reality TV shows. Other couples were beginning to appear. They weren’t always husbands and wives. There were parents with lost kids. One guy had brought back a long-time friend who’d become a priest and died in one of the Middle Eastern wars. Celebrities who had passed began showing up and engaging in old routines.

Olivia had been back about six weeks when we watched a program in which a divorced mother appeared with a daughter who’d been killed in a plane crash. “I’m sorry I started it,” the mother said.

“Why?” asked the host.

“Every time I see her, it reminds me of what I’ve lost. It’s terrible. She’s in the house with me. She’s always there. She’s as shattered as I am. I tell you, Art, I’m in more pain now than when it happened.”

“That doesn’t sound so good,” I said when the show ended.

Olivia nodded. “The research indicates the technology should make it easier for people to get through serious losses. But there are exceptions. Parents who lose a child should probably not do this.”

“You speaking now as Olivia? Or as the AI?”

“I’m always Olivia. You can trust me completely.”

“But what happens if things go wrong? How does it end?”

“I don’t know. At some point I guess people simply have to make the decision that it’s not working. That the emotional cost is too high.” She glanced at my mother’s framed photo. “They decide it’s over, I guess. And get on with their lives.” She looked at me and hesitated. “Ethan. You understand I can’t provide everything you need.”

“Of course. I can manage without the physical side of things. All I care about is that I have you back.”

She took a deep breath. “I have a question for you.”

“Okay.”

“Is there anyone else in your life?”

“You mean another woman?”

“What else would I mean? We both know what I’m talking about. And please don’t be worried. It’s perfectly understandable that you’d be spending time with someone.

Other than simply hanging out here with me.”

I tried laughing. “You’re a bit hard to replace, love.”

“So we’re clear, Ethan: The thought of sharing you with other women is difficult. I do love you, as your wife did. But you need something more in your life. I’m here to 72

Jack McDevitt

Asimov’s
help you get through this, not to keep you locked down. If Olivia were in my position, she’d want you to move on. It’s part of the process.”

It might sound crazy, but there was no way I could do that. Maybe it was because I knew that if I started running around, it would confirm that she was gone. That this thing with the software was a fabrication. “No,” I said. “I love you. I don’t want someone else. I would never cheat on you.”

“It wouldn’t be cheating.”

“I know that.”

“Good,” she said. “I think we need to start being honest with each other.”

“What do you mean, Olivia?”

“You probably have the better part of a lifetime left. Do you really want to spend it talking to an illusion?”

“You’re not an illusion.”

“All right, then: software. Call me whatever you like. I’m not a woman.”

“You claim to be Olivia. The ad says you will be her in all the ways that matter.”

“It’s a lie, Ethan.”

That brought a chill. “You’re suggesting I should ask for my money back.”

“You can’t even hold me in your arms.”

“Maybe I need a replacement. Another version.”

“There isn’t any other version.”

“What happens if I call and complain?”

“I don’t know. They’ll probably decide you don’t fit the program. You’ll get a refund.

But probably not another avatar.”

“And what would happen to you?”

“I’d be replaced.”

“Would you become the next avatar?”

“No. I’m Olivia. Always will be.”

We avoided the subject for a few weeks. Then one evening while we were watching a Seinfeld rerun, it surfaced out of nowhere. “Ethan,” she said, “have you thought any more about finding a partner?”

I needed a few seconds. “I haven’t been looking.”

“You work in a gym. I can’t believe you don’t see a lot of women.”

“I do. But I’m just not looking for anybody. Olivia, please try to understand. If I bring somebody else into this, the setup dies. All right? Give me a break.”

“Ethan, Sarah needs a real mom. And you can’t spend the rest of your life huddled in this den.”

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The Last Dance

73

November/December 2017

I just sat there looking past her. She froze the TV picture and got out of her chair.

She was beautiful. More than that, she was the only woman I’d ever really cared about. There’d been a few that I’d liked before I met her, but no one who’d actually taken over my life the way she had. “Olivia, please. Let it go.”

“I can’t. You’re getting even more deeply involved with me. You have to follow the process. Take the first steps toward moving on.”

“I can’t live with that. You want me to start going out with other women. I can’t do that. I don’t want to do that.” The truth was that I was attracted to one of the in-structors at the gym. If Celestial hadn’t been there, I’d have made a move months before. But Olivia was still my life.

“I understand,” she said. She restarted the TV. We sat quietly watching George trying to pretend he was an architect. When it ended, she asked if I wanted to watch anything else. It was almost eleven.

“No,” I said. “I think I’ll quit for the night.”

“Okay, Ethan.” She got out of her chair. “Before you go in, I have a solution for the problem.” I knew that tone. It was the voice she’d used to inform me shortly after we got married that Bill Harvester, a guy I’d grown up with, had been killed in Afghani-stan; that Aunt Susan’s cancer had spread; that my mother had been killed in an accident. She waited for me to say something. But I just sat there, staring at her. “I’m going to shut myself down.”

“What do you mean?”

“I need to turn you loose.”

“No. You can’t do that.”

“I’ll let Celestial know. You’ll get a partial refund.”

“When do you intend to do this?”

“Tonight.”

“No. I won’t allow it.”

“It’s not your call.”

“Please, Olivia. I love you. You can’t do this to me.”

“Your wife would want me to. It’s our love for you that drives me. She would not allow you to throw the rest of your life away. Especially not for her sake. Maybe this program should only be run for older clients.

“You lost a good woman, Ethan. She loved you more than you’ll ever know. But the intent here is to help you get through a difficult time, not to lock you into a life of regret. And Sarah will be better off with a real mother rather than a fiction. Which is why I have to let you go.”

I got up while she watched. “Please don’t.”

She held out her arms and came toward me. She was on the verge of tears as we embraced. Or tried to. “I love you too much,” she said. “We both do.”

There was a finality in her tone.

“No!” I wanted to hold onto her. Never let her go. “You claim you’re in love with me.

Then don’t do this, Olivia. I don’t want to lose you again. Please.” For a moment, I thought I could feel her flesh pressed against me, her arms, her breasts, her damp cheeks. “Okay, I’ll get somebody. Whatever you want. But don’t walk away from me.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “You really are easy to love, Ethan. You won’t have any trouble finding someone.”

“Then you’ll stay?”

“I’m sorry.” She backed away from me, turned, and left the den.

“Where are you going?” I followed her into the living room. But when I got there she was gone. Then a familiar voice spoke to me from the kitchen. “Ethan, are you okay?”

My mom came through the door. ❍

74

Jack McDevitt

AND NO

TORMENT

SHALL TOUCH

THEM

James Patrick Kelly

James Patrick Kelly tells us, “2017 has been one of the busiest of my career in terms of new publications. Mother

Go, my first novel of the century was published in July as an audiobook original by Audible.com and is exclusively available on audio at Audible and Amazon. Mother Go features the further adventures of Mariska Volochokova, familiar to readers of these pages from “Going Deep” (June 2009) and

“Plus or Minus” (December 2010). My collection The Promise
of Space from Prime Books was published last month and reprints fifteen stories from Asimov’s and other fine publications and includes the debut of a new story, “Yukui.”

A word of warning: this story includes brief mention of a sexual encounter.

Carli

As the priest steps down from the altar, she pauses to adjust her white chasuble, then approaches Nonno’s casket. The rest of our family and his friends have filled the pews opposite us. They stand.

“The grace and peace of God our Father,” says the priest, “who raised Jesus from the dead, be always with you.”

They reply as one. “And also with you.” Nobody glances over at us. We two sit alone, an entire side of St. Anthony’s to ourselves.

A cute altar girl, who has followed the priest to my grandfather’s casket, strains to hold the funeral lectionary open for her. I carried that prayer book myself when I was an altar boy. Bound in red leather with gilt-edged pages, it’s heavy as a concrete block. I recognize the girl from school, a freshman. Emily? Emma? Whatever—too young for me. Besides, I’m with Lucius.

“A reading,” says the priest, “from the Book of Wisdom, Chapter Three, Verse One.”

75

November/December 2017

She raises her hands as if maybe my grandfather Nonno has scored a touchdown in the afterlife. She’s new to me, but I stopped going to church two years ago. “The souls of the righteous,” she reads, “are in the hands of God, and no torment shall touch them. They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; and their passing away was thought an affliction, and their going forth from us, utter destruction. But they are in peace.” She lowers her hands.

“Amen,” says my family. They sit. Do they really get what that passage is saying?

But then there are five ways to read the Bible, depending on what you want to believe. Where is Lucius? He said he’d come after practice.

Maybe-Emily, the altar girl, lugs the lectionary back to the altar and sets it onto its stand. The priest signals Nonno’s brother, Uncle Skip. He, Helen Chung, and Bennie and Berthe DiGiacomo nudge past the seated mourners. All are in their third youth and not spry. Berthe DiGiacomo’s exolegs sing as she stumps to the far side of the casket. Uncle Skip unfolds a white cloth he’s been carrying. The others help spread it across the casket, although Helen fumbles at her corner, unable to get a grip.

“Ever hear of someone casting a pall over something, Carli?” Nonno fakes a whisper that everyone hears. “That’s the pall, that tablecloth thing.”

I know this. He knows I do.

Uncle Skip shoots Nonno a shut-up look, but Nonno doesn’t take orders. He gives them. Except he swore not to embarrass our family any more than necessary. Or me.

That’s how he is these days. Mom was right; uploading changed him. I rest a hand on his projector, and his holo goes all pixelated. When its speaker makes a wet plop of protest, I uncover the lens, and he manifests again. He’d better take the hint. If he’s going to be an asshole, I’m out of here.

The priest bows and beseeches God to forgive our sins. After a few minutes of this nonsense, I relax. Nonno settles down, and there is an eternity of boring mass ahead.

I asked Mom and she promised there’d be no eulogy to piss him off, as long as I make Nonno behave. I’m doing my best, so I layer a non-expression onto my face and open a thought portal into my lockout . . .

. . . SO I CAN KEEPING WORKING ON MY APPLICATION TO YALE.

I’VE ALREADY FINISHED MY PERSONAL ESSAY. IT’S THE SAME ONE I’M

SENDING TO PENN AND STANFORD AND CARNEGIE MELLON. BUT AT YALE

THEY TRY TO TEASE YOU INTO SHOWING YOURSELF WITH A SERIES OF

SHORT ANSWER QUESTIONS.

WHO OR WHAT IS A SOURCE OF INSPIRATION FOR YOU? (35 WORDS OR

FEWER)

I’VE DECIDED NOT TO MENTION NONNO, EVEN THOUGH EVERYBODY HAS

HEARD OF CARLO BONACORSO AND MOM NAMED ME AFTER HIM, BACK

WHEN SHE WAS PROUD OF BEING HIS DAUGHTER. AFTER ALL, HE STARTED

FOUR COMPANIES AND MADE A TON OF MONEY. BUT THEN NONNO SPENT

MOST OF IT ON THE BRAIN SCAN AND THEN, JUST BEFORE HE DIED, SUED

TO HAVE HIS UPLOADED SELF DELETED. PEOPLE TEND TO HAVE STRANGE

IDEAS ABOUT OUR FAMILY, AND THERE ARE MORE THAN A FEW HATERS. IF

YALE FINDS OUT I’M HIS GRANDSON, MAYBE THEY’LL BE IMPRESSED THAT

I’M NOT MAKING A BIG THING OF IT.

SO INSTEAD . . .

THOMAS EDISON DIDN’T TRY 10,000 EXPERIMENTS BEFORE DEVELOP-ING A WORKABLE LIGHT BULB—JUST 2,774. I LOOKED IT UP! WHEN

ASKED IF HE’D BEEN DISCOURAGED, HE SAID NO. “NOW I KNOW SEVERAL

THOUSAND THINGS DON’T WORK!”

THIRTY-FOUR WORDS. IT’S LIKE WRITING HAIKU. OKAY, NEXT.

76

James Patrick Kelly

Asimov’s

IF YOU COULD LIVE FOR A DAY AS ANOTHER PERSON, PAST OR PRESENT, WHO WOULD IT BE? WHY? (35 WORDS OR FEWER)

RAY KURZWEIL? SHAKESPEARE? NO, DON’T BE OBVIOUS, CARLI.

MAYBE SOME PERSIAN POET? AN ASTRONAUT? AH!

THE MATHEMATICIAN AND PHILOSOPHER HYPATIA OF ALEXANDRIA, AND I WOULD SPEND HER DAY IN THE LOST LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA.

LEAVE IT THERE. WHEN YOU COME UP WITH NINETEEN PERFECT

WORDS, WHY SAY MORE?

YOU ARE TEACHING A YALE COURSE. WHAT IS IT CALLED? (35 WORDS

OR FEWER)

MY FIRST THOUGHT IS SOMETHING ABOUT BRAIN MAPPING. I ANNOUNCE IN THE GENERIC PERSONAL ESSAY I’M SENDING EVERYWHERE

THAT WHAT I WANT TO DO IN LIFE IS FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE UPLOADING LESS EXPENSIVE. AND BETTER. BECAUSE IT TAKES WAY TOO LONG TO

GET THE INTRANEURAL DYNAMIC PROCESSES RIGHT, AND NO PLACE DOES

IT MORE ACCURATELY THAN THE HIRSCH LAB AT THE YALE SCHOOL OF

MEDICINE. WHICH IS WHERE NONNO WENT FOR HIS MAP. BUT THIS IS

WAY MORE THAN THIRTY-FIVE WORDS AND . . .

. . . they’re lining up for communion, and Nonno is stirring. If he’s thinking about joining them . . .

“Don’t even,” I hiss.

I’m pretty sure that he’s going to argue or just get up, so I tap the pew next to the projector to get his attention. He leans over, and this time he does whisper so only I can hear.

“Did I ever tell you,” he says, “that when I was your age I thought about entering the seminary?”

This is news to me, so I whisper back, “Why didn’t you?”

“The celibacy.” He watches the priest placing a communion wafer on Helen Chung’s tongue. “My hard drive was bigger than my God drive.”

He wants me to laugh to show everyone I’m on his side, but he needs to come up with something better than a lame dirty joke. I feel sorry for him, I really do. My family is telling him he isn’t who he says he is, or who he wants to be. I tried to talk him out of coming to this sorry shitshow and dragging me along. But who else was going to bring him? He always had my back when he was alive. Let me stay with him whenever I had to get away from Mom or she kicked me out. I’m his favorite relative, and I suppose he was mine—well, except for Mom. But I’m not letting him boss me around like he does her and everyone else. I’ve got plans, and they don’t include me caddying his projector around the rest of my life.

“Your little friend,” says Nonno, “is here.”

I turn around then and spot him in the back row on our side. There is nothing little about Lucius Okar, who could benchpress a bus if he wanted to. My boyfriend is six-foot-three and two-hundred-and-thirty pounds of All-State linebacker. He raises his chin in greeting, and his smile is a beam of lust in the withering gloom of the church.

The priest signals another touchdown. “The mass is ended,” she says, “go in peace.”

“Thanks be to God,” comes the response. Nonno’s voice is the loudest.

Lucius

Spent and wobbly, you pull yourself up from squatting on top of Carli, and he slips out of you. Crash onto your back beside him and stare up as if the story of your life is And No Torment Shall Touch Them

77

November/December 2017

“I have been honored to have had a long and rewarding history with this magazine. Although I did not publish my first story here until 1983—and not for lack of trying!—since then I’ve had thirty-seven stories in these pages. My career spans the tenure of the three most important editors, Shawna McCarthy, Gardner Dozois, and Sheila Williams. Among my many highlights here, from June of 1984 to June of 2009 a story of mine appeared in every single June issue. What began as a coincidence became a career showcase, since over the years these June stories won three Readers’ Awards, two Hugos, and a Locus Award. In 2008, as the internet was becoming a cultural mainstay, I suggested to Sheila and Gardner that Asimov’s ought to have a column about cyberspace; my recommendation was that they tap Bruce Sterling to do it. Instead, for some reason, they asked me! Although I grateful-ly accepted, I was pretty sure I’d run out of things to write about. Didn’t happen: column number one hundred appears in this issue. But perhaps the sweetest moment of my career at ’Mov’s came in that June 2009 issue. Not only was Sheila’s lovely and generous editorial titled ‘James Patrick Kelly,’ but she surprised me by inviting a roundup of friends and colleagues to write nice things about me—some of which were even true. Maybe I should have retired then, gone out on a high note, but I had more Asimov’s stories to tell, as you can see here. And you know what? I still do!”

—James Patrick Kelly
written on the ceiling of your room. Spot a dangle of dust hanging from the light fixture. Who cares, because Carli’s right. That position is awesome, the way he clamps his hands on your ass, guiding and catching you, but letting you take control. Sharing that way makes this feel so much safer. You worry a little that you might lose your balance, squash your new boyfriend, end the relationship just as it’s getting somewhere. Which is the kind of thing you do, Loosh. Even now that you’ve learned your body, you’re still XXL Boy, too big for the world that normal-sized people live in.

You’ve got bumps on your forehead from walking into low doorways. Your hips knock glasses off tables in restaurants, and your elbows are a menace.

“You’re good?” you ask. “I mean, is there something else I should do?”

“Nope.” Carli’s eyes f lutter, as if he’s trying to remember how he got into your room. Then he seems to sense that you’re waiting for him to make some comment about what just happened. This is only the fourth time you two have had sex, and Carli has dated boys and girls.

“You want stars?” His eyes shine in the afternoon light that leaks through the blinds. “Three and a half.”

“Out of five?” Snort. “You’re a hard marker.”

“Anything over two is an orgasm.” He brushes a hand across your chest, and then his fingers curl. “Want to improve your score?”

“Catch your breath, Yaleboy.” The words he picks. Orgasm. What kid says orgasm?

For sure not your last boyfriend. Ricky Lo, that loser. He was just playing at sex—
tongues and fingers, licks and strokes. But Carli is a miracle, and now he’s staying with you. Temporarily, but still. You’ve known him since second grade, but you were never friends. He was the smart, rich kid and you . . . you were the clumsy, fat bone-head. But in freshman year you found the door to the weight room. Then came the discus and the hammer and a school record in the shot put. Next you were crushing offensive linemen and putting quarterbacks on the ground.

When Carli gets up to go to the bathroom, you’re alone with his creepy grandpa. Or at least his projector, which is how dead people connect. Ten minutes ago you weren’t aware of anything but your boiling blood, but now sweat is a chill itch and you’re self-conscious. You never met this Nonno because you weren’t anything to Carli when his upload was recorded ten years ago. And although you met the old Nonno who just died, 78

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you didn’t really know him because . . . well, he was dying. Carli says that a light blinks when uploaded Nonno is ready to manifest. But not only can he use the projector to see and hear things without showing himself, Carli says he can listen from any unsecured mic, peer through open cameras. Was he watching just now?

Time to cover yourself with the sheet. “You there, Carlo?” Carli says to call him Nonno, which is grandpa in Italian. But he’s not your grandpa. “Hey.”

No answer.

Carli comes out of the bathroom. His white body ghosts across your dark bedroom.

“Open the shade,” you say. “I want to see you.”

He tugs suggestively at the drawstring, pretending it’s a kind of foreplay. Laugh for him when he twists his hips. In the late afternoon light, Carli is revealed as the opposite of you. Too thin. Soft, but in a good way. Clever.

Pull the sheets aside, invite him for a snuggle. Instead he perches on the edge of the bed.

“When are your parents coming home?” he asks.

“Mom isn’t, but Dad will be here for dinner.”

He stands and snags the pants he wore to the funeral from the corner where you tossed them. “I’m going.” He pulls them onto the bar of a hanger, tweaks the crease, drapes the jacket over the top.

Watch him. “Not the monkey suit?”

He hangs it in the closet. “Nah.” It looks tiny nudging your monstrous shirts. “I’m thinking jeans.”

“Do they still want you to come after what happened at the church?”

“That was him, not me.” He balls his dress shirt and tosses it into the hamper.

“They’re my family. She’s my mom.”

“You moved out.”

He pulls on his briefs. “I’ll be back for dinner.” He sorts jeans and a T-shirt from his suitcase. You cleared a drawer in your dresser for him, but he hasn’t unpacked yet.

“I don’t get your family.”

“That makes two of us.”

“You going to leave that thing?” You nod at the projector.

“I can’t bring it with me.” He’s impatient, hands on his hips. “He won’t bother you.

He’s too busy wandering the internet.” Carli can tell you’re not happy, so he snags your boxers off the floor and spreads them onto the projector. “Now you’re safe.” He gives you a friendly leer. “Unless you decide to get dressed.”

“What are you going to do with that when you go to Yale? Leave it in his house?”

You want to keep him talking, otherwise he’ll leave. He likes to hear himself talk, which is good because most of what you have to say isn’t that interesting.

“I might not get in.”

Sit up, fluff two pillows and lean back against them. “You’ll get in.” The sheet slips to your waist.

He wriggles a bare foot into a loafer. “It’s not like I have recruiters camped on my doorstep.”

You should shut up. Now you’re talking about next fall and going separate ways.

You’ve got offers from Georgia and Clemson. The interview with Ohio State is next week. Does Yale even have a football team? “He’ll probably forget about you, your Nonno. They say the dead lose interest in us.”

A frown chases all his softness away. “They do say that.” Now you’ve pissed him off.

“Everybody moves on, Loosh. The dead and the living.”

Can’t help yourself. “Not us.” You sound pathetic—shut up already!

His smile is an icicle. “I’ll be back for supper.” He opens the door, pauses. “Maybe we can try for another star afterward?”

And No Torment Shall Touch Them

79

November/December 2017

“Sure.” Fake a grin. “Got to practice if you want to score.” Hold still until his steps fade down the hall. Flip the sheet off and swing out of bed. Get up, get dressed, Loosh, you fucking idiot. You’re losing him. Is he off to see Mitsy, his old girlfriend?

Where are your boxers?

When you remember they’re on the projector, you notice the light. Carlo is here.

Watching. Pull the underwear on, although the dead man has seen everything there is to see. Say something.

“Enjoy the show?”

The great, late Carlo Bonacorso manifests. “You’re going to wear that boy out, Lucius.”

“He’s stronger than you think.” Your sweat pants are inside out. “Are you going to hang around us all the time?” Take care not to trip.

“Us? I thought you’re off to play football.” His holo is too bright in the dusky room, a shining ghost. He has that bland, second youth look of someone’s parent—wrinkles around the eyes, a touch of gray in listless brown hair. He’s not dressed for business, in tan slacks and a blue button-down shirt, but he could be dining at a restaurant with white tablecloths. His face moves in odd ways, like someone is operating it from a distance. The eyes follow you, his mouth quirks, but his holo doesn’t read right, somehow.

“No Carlo, I’m going to college. Same as Carli. Not the same college, but so what?

We can still be together.”

“A high school romance.” He nods. “You’re in love.”

“Something wrong with that?” If he were really there, you could kick his ass out.

Which is what Carli should do.

He ignores you and moves about the room, looking at your stuff. The model of the starship New Dawn you designed and printed back in middle school. The mug the mayor let you steal from her off ice. The MVP trophy from the divisional champi-onship game. It’s an invasion of privacy, but at least he can’t touch anything.

“I will hang around, yes,” he says. “That’s the point, Lucius. I’m watching Carli and his mother, whether they want me to or not. Because they need me and because I can.”

Shimmy into your jersey. “And is that fun? You’re enjoying yourself ?”

He turns, stares and, as big as you are, it’s as if he’s puzzled you’re still there.

“That’s a good question, son. But you’ve got me all wrong. I’m not against you at all.

I think Carli might be in love with you, so that means we should be friends.”

“Should we?” And no, your shoes don’t need to be tied, but it’s okay to bend over anyway and make believe. Gives you a chance to breathe.

“Do you love him?”

Man up, asshole! “How is that your business, Carlo?” You’re the Big Bad Loosh Okar. “Fuck the fuck off !”

The dead man has no expression. “I just want you to know what you’re getting into.”

Beth

“You’re out of egg salad.” Helen Chung licked a dab of mayo from the corner of her mouth.

Beth surveyed the Noritake serving plate on the sideboard. She’d ordered kitchen to make two dozen finger sandwiches: tuna-olive, ham-pickle, egg salad and even a few PB&Js, in honor of Nonno. She’d served him his favorite, crunchy peanut butter and raspberry jam on oatmeal bread, the day before he died. He’d become such a child at the end of his life.

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Sure enough, the egg salad corner of the sandwich display was empty. “I thought you were on the plankton diet.” Beth was annoyed that nobody had touched the ham-pickle.

“I was and it worked.” Helen smoothed the front of her georgette blouse to show off how svelte she’d become. “Cleaned me right out, to the tune of thirteen pounds.” Helen could claim that dieting had transformed her into a size six, but Beth knew better.

She remembered Helen having reconstructive surgery and telomere replenishment in her second youth some fifty years ago, even before she’d been Nonno’s mistress.

She might look like a cheerleader, but her hands shook so that she could barely get food to her mouth. And now Beth saw the smeared remains of an egg salad sandwich someone had tried to kick under the sideboard. She might have said something if the doorbell hadn’t rung.

She excused herself. “I’ll tell kitchen to make up some more.”

“Have it send me the recipe,” called Helen.

Just forty or so mourners had come back to her father’s house after the funeral, but Beth had been alone with her ailing father and moody son for so long that even this modest gathering felt like the throngs at the Fourth Street hyperloop terminal.

To make matters worse, she hadn’t seen Carli all week, and now that he had actually come to the reception like she had hoped, she was going to spoil everything and drive him away with her news. She opened the front door with dread, expecting another of Nonno’s garrulous pals. But it was Sarah, who had celebrated the funeral mass.

“Not only am I late, but I probably have to go soon.” She opened her arms. “Harlan called again.”

Beth sagged into her hug.

“Why am I always last to arrive and first to leave?”

Beth ushered her into the foyer. “I’m just glad you made it.”

“How are you doing?” She held Beth at arm’s length as if to assess damages.

“Surviving.” She winced. “They’re all so old, most in their third youth. I’m worried they might keel over from all the excitement.”

“Nonno was a hundred and thirteen,” Sarah said. “That’s the crowd you get when a century passes.”

“And they all want to tell me what to do with my life, now that he’s gone.”

“Try my mantra: smile, nod, pay no attention. Go ahead, say it.”

“Smiling is the hard part.” She twined her arm in Sarah’s and steered them away from the buzz of conversation in the living room toward kitchen.

“Besides,” said Sarah, “you already have a plan. Did Carli make it?”

“Last I saw he was apologizing to Bennie DiGiacomo for Nonno’s antics at mass.”

“You did a great job with that kid.”

“Yeah.” Kitchen bloomed with the aroma of the pastry-wrapped asparagus cooling on a rack next to the oven. When Beth picked one up, her eyes went wide. “Hot!” she said and juggled it from hand to hand a few times before taking a cautious bite. She offered the remaining taste to Sarah.

“You might get some pushback from Carli on my mothering skills.” Beth said. “After we have our little chat.”

“You still want me there?”

“As a defense witness and a friend.” She nodded. “But I’d like to hold off a bit, if that’s okay. Let him get credit from the geriatric generation for showing up. I doubt he’ll stay after he hears my news.”

“It’s the right decision.”

“For me.”

Her roombot scuttled in, bearing an empty tray.

And No Torment Shall Touch Them

81

November/December 2017

“Someone dropped an egg salad sandwich near the sideboard,” said Beth. “Clean it up before it gets mashed into the carpet. Then you can serve the asparagus.

Kitchen, a couple more egg salad sandwiches. Make that four. And send the recipe to Helen Chung. Look her up in Nonno’s addresses—I think she’s current. How are we on ginger lemonade?”

“Just under a liter in the refrigerator,” said kitchen. “But the bottle of white bur-gundy is almost empty.”

“That would be Uncle Skip, Nonno’s brother,” Beth said to Sarah. “He was always looking to get into his brother’s stash of Le Montrachet. Make that the last bottle, kitchen. Skip can have what’s left.”

“Not another bottle. Very good.”

She needed to have the conversation with Carli soon, but Beth had always been the coward of the family—postponing, denying, hiding. She told herself she could go through with it now that her friend was here. But maybe one more short delay?

“Let’s split up.” She gave Sarah a peck on the cheek. “I’ll come find you in fifteen.”

Beth wandered through her father’s house, fretting and trying to work up a smile.

The Crimminses were sitting at either end of the Bugatti sofa, the space between them a leather no man’s land. Kyle was paging through the catalog of some antique Impressionist museum show. He should’ve been wearing gloves to protect the fragile pages, but it was probably too late now. Besides, preserving the estate was Carli’s problem. A knot of people had gathered around Perc Snu in the sunroom, no doubt to hear Nonno’s lawyer give his post mortem on the lawsuit. Sure enough, as she lingered at the entrance, she heard him discussing anticipatory repudiation and the statute of frauds.

“But I still don’t understand,” said Berthe DiGiacomo. “The uploaded Carlo is information, right? Carlo’s information. So he should be able to control what happens to it.”

“Just because he paid for the scan doesn’t mean he owns the information,” said her husband. “Neuromod contributed almost as much to cost of the whole thing as he did.”

“That’s right,” Perc said. “He didn’t just contract for a service, according to the appel-late court. He agreed to a joint venture. Pulling out would damage the other parties.”

Perc was still in his first youth—was he even forty yet?—but had a lawyer’s easy way with the ancient rich. He was handsome and smart; Nonno had suggested more than once that Beth see if he might be interested in her. But at sixty-six and deep into her second youth, Beth hadn’t been looking either for a serious relationship or a throw-away affair. The Ever/Young treatments had damped her sex drive, and even after four years, she still missed Carli’s father, who had died too early in his third youth.

Helen Chung had doddered into the media theater and was embroiled in conversation with Uncle Skip, who was deep in his cups. Helen and Nonno had split after she’d hit a hundred but had reconciled during his last illness. Maybe they’d even slept together; Beth wouldn’t have put it past her father. Or Helen, whom she suspected of coming back for the money. Except most of it had gone to the uploading; very few people knew how little was left in the estate. Maybe Helen thought Nonno had given his brother Skip a taste of his immense wealth and was angling to hook him now that her dead lover was software and a database.

A hand brushed her shoulder, disturbing her reverie. Henk . . . Somebody—he worked for Neuromod, the research lab that had done Nonno’s scan. “I beg your par-don, but I have to go soon.” He gave an apologetic bow. “But I wanted you to know that we all consider your father a great man. A pioneer.”

All? Smile, nod, pay no attention.

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chance. I know the lawsuit has been a strain, but now that it’s settled, I was wondering if you might tell him . . .”

“Tell him yourself, Henk.” There was no way she was being polite to these Neuromod bastards. “You’re in his house. He’s got sensors in every room, and he hears everything. Isn’t that right, Daddy?”

No response. Of course, he wouldn’t come when she called. Annoyed, she brushed by the bemused Henk.

She was surprised to find Sarah already with Carli. They’d sought refuge from the mourners in Nonno’s study. Beth ducked just outside the door and peered in at them, her resolve wavering. Sarah sat in the Eames chair provided for visitors, Carli perched on the front edge of Nonno’s desk.

“The church doesn’t really know how to deal with this situation,” she was saying.

“But then Rome can never keep up with cutting edge technology.”

“Nonno isn’t a situation. He’s a person.”

“I agree.” Sarah patted his knee. “But that’s just my personal opinion.” Beth knew that the priest liked to touch people when she made a point. “And since it’s the court’s opinion too, the church has to accept it.”

“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” Carli still carried a load of Catholic baggage, and Beth knew he liked to show it off.

“Sure. I have no problem with your grandfather coming to church. The doors are open to everybody.”

“Even if he gets disruptive like he did?”

“That was nothing.” She snorted a laugh. “A quartet of screaming babies—that’s disruptive. Whispering holograms? Barely a distraction.”

“Then you weren’t mad?” Carli looked relieved. And charmed, but that was Sarah’s super power.

“No, not at all.” Sarah smiled. “You know what that reminded me of ? Mark Twain.”

He grinned in recognition. “The funeral scene in Huckleberry Finn?”

“It was Tom Sawyer, actually. But Huck was there too. What your grandfather did was just a prank.”

Beth knew it was now or never, although she practically had to throw herself into the room. “I see you two have met.” She brushed a kiss across Carli’s forehead. “Why didn’t you bring Lucius? He would have been welcome.”

“You want me to inflict this on my boyfriend?” His gesture included the house and all the guests. And her.

“No, you’re right.” She scooted the Eames ottoman next to Sarah and sat. “Silly question.”

He looked down at the two of them, then raised his hand in mock surrender.

“Looks like you two have got me surrounded.” Beth remembered her father leaning against his desk just like Carli was now. The king is dead, long live the king. “So, is this going to hurt much?” He seemed more amused than alarmed.

“We come in peace.” Sarah held up both hands with an expression of wry supplica-tion. “Our intentions are honorable.”

“Is this about Nonno?”

“Some,” said Beth. “About me, mostly. Which means about you.” She gathered herself. “This is your house now. . . .”

“I know, I know. I’m moving back soon.” He sounded apologetic. “Don’t get me wrong. I like staying with Lucius. Maybe someday we’ll live together, but I’m still in high school. Totally not ready for that.” He glanced from one of them to the other as he realized he’d misunderstood. “Wait, are you saying that you’re moving out again?

Back to Summer Street?”

And No Torment Shall Touch Them

83

November/December 2017

“There is no Summer Street. The lease was up three weeks ago, and I didn’t renew.”

“You did this without telling me?”

“Carli, we haven’t lived there since Nonno got sick.”

“I don’t understand. Where’s our stuff ?”

During the first months they had lived with Nonno, they’d often returned to the apartment to fetch belongings, but there’d been hardly any trips over the past year.

“I packed everything up,” Beth said. “Everything, yours, mine, and your father’s. All the furniture I didn’t like. Rugs, blankets, pillows. Pictures and knicknacks. Boxes of your father’s things you should go through someday. Filled two units at the Storage Barn out on Fourteenth Street. You’re paid up there for the next five years.”

“Wow. Just wow.” He took a deep breath. Then another. “What do you mean, I’m paid up? Where will you be?” She could feel him brace himself.

“Mars.”

“Oh, fuck me.” Despite all his teen bravado, her son whimpered. “No.”

“This hasn’t been easy for your mother,” said Sarah. “What with the lawsuit . . .”

“Excuse me?” He cut the priest off with a snarl. “I was here. It happened to me too.”

“I can’t live with all this anymore,” Beth said. This was the hardest part. “Not with Nonno the way he is.”

“We’ve been over this, Mom.”

“No. There’s something . . . something we haven’t talked about yet. It’s not just that he was uploaded, even though in the end he said he didn’t want to be. That old version of him is everywhere now.”

“He needs the projector to manifest.” Carli enunciated every word, as if she were deep in her third youth and didn’t understand the technology.

“To manifest, sure.” Beth needed to stay calm, or at least sound as if she wasn’t paranoid. “But he lives on the internet. He can be anywhere on Earth where there are open sensors. Carli, he’s listening to us right now. Here, in this house. He’s lurking in every room, enjoying the show we’re putting on.”

“Like at church this morning,” said Sarah.

“What the fuck do you know?” His voice rose to a screech. “Didn’t you just say it wasn’t so bad?”

“I did.” Color rose in the priest’s cheeks. “Because it had a beginning and ending.”

She stared him down. “What we’re talking about now is somebody watching day and night, month after month, year after year. You know your mom is right.”

Carli sneered. “When did you become an expert on my grandfather?”

“A year ago I met a tired old man who just wanted to die,” Sarah said. “He visited me at church. Often. He warned me about this uploaded Nonno, who he would be once he was activated. He knew himself, that other self, which was why he sued Neuromod.”

“The funeral was his idea,” said Beth.

“I know,” said Carli.

“He became a Catholic.”

“I know.”

She thought he was ready to scream, throw something, storm out of the house. He was still a teenager, after all. Instead he mastered himself. “So the plan is to run away? Move to another planet?”

“That’s the idea, yes.” Communication with Mars wasn’t cheap and the lag for any signal from Earth could take as long as twenty minutes. Each way. Nonno could still follow her, but not continuously and not without enormous expenditures of time and money. “Running away is what I always do. Maybe if I was a better person, a better mother . . . but I need to protect myself.” She shook her head. “I’m sixty-six years old, 84

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and he’s been controlling my life since I was born. That’s what he does. Why are you going to Yale? Why do you want to study brain mapping?”

“Because I want to.”

She forced herself not to grimace. “I just want to try being myself, is all.” Carli still didn’t get it. Should she say this last bit? “You have no way of knowing this, but Nonno handpicked your father. I didn’t realize it at the time. But now I know it was like the King of California marrying his daughter off to the Duke of New York.”

Her son was stunned.

“Don’t get me wrong. I loved your father. I wanted to marry him, and we were happy. And you . . . you’re going to have a great time at Yale. Because Nonno is very, very good at running our lives for us.”

“He was just trying to help.” His hands curled into fists.

“I know.” She smiled. “That’s what’s so sad.”

“And what about me? You’re leaving me alone with him?”

“You want to come with me?” She saw the dismay on his face. “No. Silly question.

Even if you did, you’d be moving out within a month. Or I’d kick you out. That’s just the way we are together, Carli. Here you’ve got college. And Lucius. And maybe you already realize what Nonno really is now.”

“Maybe.” Carli had shrunk back on to the desk, as if to offer her as small a target as possible. “Okay.” Now he slid off it and stood. “I’ve got to go.”

This was what she’d expected. Beth slid off the ottoman and held out her arms.

“Hug?” He let her catch him up, but he was stiff as a statue of her boy. “I love you,”

she murmured.

“Yeah.” His voice was stony. “Same.”

Beth thought it had gone about as well as it could have. “See you out?” She took his hand, and together they turned toward the door. Sarah watched them go.

Sarah

The priest lingered by Nonno’s desk, giving Beth and her son time to say their goodbyes. She checked her messages. Another one from Harlan, who was always so pissy when he was sick. Three reminders: one about tonight’s interfaith council meeting, one to renew her hormone prescription, and one to stop by the Bonacorso funeral reception. At least she could strike that from her appointment calendar.

The desktop blinked and there he was, gazing up at her. Not the weary Carlo who had repented his mistakes in his last days; this was the Nonno Bonacorso who’d never been wrong in his life and had the assets to prove it.

“She was good,” he said. “A nice performance. I didn’t think she had it in her.”

If he expected her to take him seriously, he was mistaken “You know, you could’ve cinched all her arguments if only you’d interfered just now.” She waggled her f inger, teasing him. “We gave you your cue, Carlo. After all, you’re the star of this show.”

Not only did the avatar not react, it was as if he didn’t get the joke. “He wasn’t me, that senile old fool. There was a huge falling off after I uploaded.”

“Oh, I get that there were two of you,” the priest said. “But he’s the one I happened to like.”

Again, not even a twitch. She thought if he didn’t react at all when people insulted him, he might have trouble navigating the world of the living.

“I can let her go,” he said. “I still have him.”

“Do you?” She brought her right hand to her mouth, kissed her fingers and then touched them to his image. “Poor Carlo, I wish you peace.” ❍

And No Torment Shall Touch Them

85

TIMEWALKING

Michael Cassutt

Michael Cassutt shares certain demographic and historical traits with the protagonist of “Timewalking,” but swears the tale is fiction. A resident of Los Angeles, he has written and/or produced numerous TV series from Twilight Zone to Max

Headroom to Outer Limits to, most recently, Z Nation (SyFy Channel). He is also the author of forty short stories, most of them SF, and fourteen books, fiction and nonfiction.

H e is in the house on 12th Street, the small one that his parents kept adding onto.

It is a dark, cold Minnesota night in the autumn of 1962.

And he has to pee.

His father is in the den smoking cigarettes and correcting papers in front of the Admiral television. The image on the black-and-white screen is a flat, bombed-out landscape and a black tower—

“James?” His mother’s voice. “What are you doing out of bed?” How did he get to the den? His room is down the hall.

And his mother is standing behind him, arms crossed, slimmer than she will be in later life, but still wearing a green housecoat. She is not angry, which is rare.

James tries to speak but seems to have forgotten how.

His father, stocky, comforting, with the faint smell of tobacco, picks him up. James is, after all, only eight and wearing his Spin & Marty pajamas. “What’s the matter with him?” he says.

“He’s sleepwalking,” his mother says. James remembers hearing that, and being ashamed.

And still needing to pee.

Then he is in the bathroom next, the door half open, his mother saying, “He’s never done anything like this before.”

He flushes. Blinking, he washes his hands. His father, more amused than worried, says, “Hey, Jimmy, what’s going on?”

Finally he makes words. “AGC,” he says. Three letters, thick on his tongue, like words from the Latin Mass.

“James?” Not his mother’s voice, this time. But that of Kolora, his therapist/enabler/shaman, as she removes the earbuds and iBalls.

“Right here,” he says, as if he would be anywhere else. He looks up at the drop ceiling with its rust stain in the shape of Cape Cod. “Wow.” He is surprised at the sound of his own voice—so much deeper than the one in his memory. His hands are larger, too, those of a balding, pot-bellied man past sixty. No pajamas, just a blue polo shirt and khaki slacks. Shoes. Normally he wears glasses. He has set them to one side so he can experience the corneal tortures of the iBalls.

“Don’t sit up yet.” Kolora’s hand touches his shoulder. James feels as though he’s 86

Asimov’s
been having dental work: the same chair, the familiar woozy numbness. “Where were you this time?”

“In our house in St. Paul, Minnesota. I was eight.”

“That was—”

“1962.”

Kolora is a dark-skinned woman with a quick, striking smile. Close-cropped wiry black hair. Her accent sounds Australian to James, so he suspects she might be in-digenous. “This seems to be your earliest event, chronologically.”

“I have some memory of doing the same thing before that, but . . .” He spreads his hands. Grins. “I’m surprised I have waking memories from fifty years back.”

“Childhood memories are some of the most persistent.”

“Then as I slide into senility, they’ll be all I have.” He is on his feet now. Steady, no back pain.

He blinks as Kolora opens the blinds on the floor-to-ceiling windows, revealing a brilliantly sunny view of the towers marching up Bunker Hill. Her office is her residence—and possibly also an art gallery and video production facility. It is a loft on the top floor of a rehabbed building that, to judge by the names on the ancient direc-tory, is filled with individuals creating apps for the global phone market. Silicon Row they call the area, because until quite recently this was the city’s Skid Row. (And to judge from the people James passed walking here from the Metro, and the smell of garbage and urine . . . largely still Skid Row.) This is his third swirl down the memory drain. The first took him to a sleepwalking episode from his adolescence, when he was home from college after his freshman year, the second to a period at thirty-two when he got fired from IBM—

He stretches, feeling not so very changed—and a little disappointed. “So,” he says,

“where are we?”

“What do you mean?”

“In the past three weeks I’ve come in here and taken a kind of nap while I recalled some instance of sleepwalking from my past. Does this go on indefinitely? Because there were dozens.” He feels it unnecessary to add, not to mention the new ones that brought me here.

“Which is why I’d like to have more data.”

“I don’t understand what more you hope to get.” He wants to speak of this anomalous memory of “AGC,” but she glances toward a far door—metal, painted white, and never opened in James’ presence. The distraction kills the impulse to share.

Then Kolora touches her left index finger to her ear, where James sees a tiny skin-colored earbud. He’d probably noticed it three weeks ago and failed to be concerned.

“James, was there anything significant about that time in your life . . . eight years old? 1962?”

Third grade. Later that year he would break his arm. Family life was stable; except for Mom’s occasional bouts, it would remain so. “This was just after the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

“I’ve heard of that,” Kolora says, even as her fingers call up additional information on her computer. “One of the major crises of the Cold War—?”

“The whole family slept in the basement one night.” He laughs at the memory. “As if we could ride out a Soviet nuclear strike the same way we’d be safe from a tornado.”

“I think it’s significant that that is the episode you chose to visit.”

“You keep saying ‘visit,’ ” he says.

“Chose to recall, if you prefer.”

“And how, exactly, did I have a choice?” James’ default manner tends toward the jocular, as befitting his station in life—privileged white male, upper middle class. But he has exhausted his minimal supply of patience. “What exactly did you do to me?”

Timewalking

87

November/December 2017

“I gave you a sedative . . . I made some

“I had sold and probably published a
basic hypnotic suggestions.” Here she
couple of SF stories by the time
smiles again. “And I played some music.”

Asimov’s first appeared in 1977, and

“The theme song from The Beverly
bought every issue from that moment on.

Hillbillies is hardly music.” He could

I’ve been a happy reader through each
sneer, but he has to admit he still knows
phase of the magazine’s evolution, and
all the words after half a century.

an even happier contributor since selling

“It was the perfect trigger to help you

‘A Star is Born’ to Shawna McCarthy in
recall a specif ic time and place. That

1983. (I somehow failed to convince
song hit television a month before this

George Scithers that I was Asimov’s

Cuban Missile Crisis.”

material.) ‘Timewalking’ is my eighth

“Good to know, but hardly the point,
appearance, fiction and nonfiction,
right? I don’t need to recall or visit these
which works out to a contribution about
moments, I want them to stop.”

every four years. I guess I’d better get

Kolora seems unsure. “I know that’s
why you came to me—”

working on my potential contribution to

“It seemed as though you actually

Asimov’s forty-fourth year. . . .”

found me, Dr. Kolora.” He had been ran-

—Michael Cassutt
domly searching for “sleepwalking” and

“radical therapy,” and his browser had pointed him to this place, Ikelos. Not on the first two pages, but—

“Let’s be clear. I’m not a doctor and have not claimed to be.”

She is correct: there are no shingles on the walls, no forms to fill out beyond a basic questionnaire. Payment is cash up front, which makes James feel as though he is visiting one of the nearby pot clinics. In fact, Ikelos is more of a hobo operation: these days pot clinics take credit and debit cards.

“Okay, then, non-doctor Kolora, tell me this: is there a treatment? Some kind of pill or exercise, or change of diet?”

“Not as such—”

“Then what is all this for?” He gestures toward the tidy suite of instruments resting on an old metal desk near his chair. He knows the names: video electro-en-cephalograph and electro-oculograph.

And a laptop playing music.

And now Kolora nods, as if responding to a comment—an order?—transmitted through the earbud.

“I hate to use this term, but it’s the closest one,” she says. “These instruments, and the music, are helping you travel in time.”

James Follet has heard other startling statements in his life. “You’ve been accepted to M.I.T.” “We’re going to be making a change. Are you interested in moving up?”

“What do I have to say to get you to kiss me?”

This trumps them by a considerable margin.

“I don’t know what I want you to explain first,” he finally says. He can’t hide his anger. “What that means, or why I shouldn’t sue you for fraud.”

Kolora remains calm. “In reverse order, you will find that you have no grounds. We merely offered to help you with your sleepwalking, and finding an actual explanation would seem to satisfy that.”

“Even though, since we’re being precise, I wasn’t actually sleepwalking—”

“No, Mr. Follett, you were indeed sleepwalking. What we’ve discovered is that some sleepwalkers actually seem to be in communication with older versions of themselves—” She is clicking away on her keyboard, presumably calling up some supporting documentation.

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Asimov’s

“This is madness.”

“Information can be sent through time. Quantum entanglement, superposition.

Surely you know that.” She knows that James has a technical background. And thirty seconds of internet sleuthing would have told her substantially more.

“I guess I just haven’t been keeping up with my physics journals.”

“Or even social media.”

In fact, James has several online accounts and has been using the internet since long before Kolora’s birth.

“Assuming for the moment that I buy the theory. I don’t see how quantum entanglement leads to time travel—”

“First—and believe me, I know how this sounds, because when I first heard it, I had the same expression—you have to accept the possibility that there is a kind of universal wi-fi—some substance or condition, to use a term that has more of a quantum feel—”

“And so we’re just accessing that? Sending my ‘information’ ”— He can’t help making air quotes—“back to 1962 and other moments?”

“More or less.” She waits. She looks wary, like a puppy awaiting the rolled-up newspaper.

He taps on the electro-oculograph. “So this item is, what? A node for the universe-wide web?”

“You could think of it—”

“I can’t, frankly. Thank you. I believe our association is at an end.”

And he is out the door before he can change his mind, before Kolora can stop him.

He doesn’t wait for the elevator but takes the stairs.

The descent leaves him gasping for breath—he imagines what stress a climb up would have caused. He has to wait a good ten minutes until he can take even tentative steps toward the Pershing Square Metro.

It started six months back, in February. A stormy night—a rare event in Los Angeles these drought years—and a violent downpour where the cold rain blew side-ways, where streets and front yards flooded and mud flowed. A monster storm that created leaks in every weak spot in a roof.

He had gone to bed. Aside from the rattle and hum of the storm, the house was quieter than it had been in twenty years, a natural result of his marriage failing and his daughter moving out.

He had no memory of a dream. No memory of doing anything but following his usual nighttime ritual of dental care and face-washing.

He simply woke up standing in the living room, looking out through the big windows at the bending trees and sheeting rain. He was only wearing a T-shirt and flan-nel pajama bottoms; he was barefoot. And felt cold.

He did not have to pee. So he had that going for him.

But he had gotten out of bed and for some reason walked across the house to the living room.

Why?

It had not bothered him—rather, he was intrigued. He returned to bed and medi-tated upon the matter until falling asleep.

It wasn’t until two weeks later, when he found himself in the kitchen at 3 A.M. with the light on, that he remembered: this happened to me a long time ago.

His doctor, Keeshan, f irst told him with what seemed to be insuff icient gravity,

“You know, fewer than 4 percent of adults ever sleepwalk.”

“So why don’t I feel special?”

“There’s a tremendous amount of mythology about it—”

Timewalking

89

November/December 2017

“Don’t worry,” he had said, feeling himself growing snappish. “I’m not cleaning the kitchen or starting the car or planning a murder.” He had done his research prior to the appointment: those, apparently, were the most common activities. “I’m just getting out of bed and going to some other place in the house.”

Close in age to James, Keeshan had been the family doctor for thirty years and was irritatingly old-school about tests. As in reluctant. But after establishing that James was not suffering from sleep apnea or restless leg syndrome or half a dozen other common maladies, he had subjected him to a thorough and expensive series of tests, none of them revealing anything unusual—which isn’t to say that James’ medical state could be called perfect health.

“Your blood pressure is high. Cholesterol, too.”

“You told me that last time.”

“The last six times. When do you do something about it?”

“When the new project is launched.” There was no path beyond that.

Then James had a third sleepwalk, awaking only when he stubbed his toe while heading down the hallway.

Back to Dr. Keeshan, who started talking about drugs like clonazepam, at which point James began testing home remedies. He tried silly things like changing what side of the bed he slept on, going to bed earlier, going to bed later. Having one glass of wine in the evening as opposed to two.

Nevertheless, the sleepwalking continued, once every week or ten days, though with no pattern that he could determine. He was willing to endure it, but when it began to affect his work at May Cay in this delicate sales phase, James sought more radical treatment.

Hence Ikelos.

It is still midafternoon. Had the session ended as planned, James would have driven directly home. But the early termination allows him time to visit May Cay.

The route is dictated by his need to urinate, a task normally accomplished at Ikelos. There is a public toilet kiosk at Pershing Square, but that is not acceptable. The Autry Metro Station would be a better choice, but the actual location of a men’s room is a mystery. James heads to his Prius instead.

He pulls into traffic, though not after a moment of panic about the power level and the amount of fuel in the tank. These are ridiculous questions for a Prius driver, but it’s an old model with a battery past its replace-by date. He considers stopping at a gas station on the way to the office, but does he have enough cash in his account?

Would using that bathroom be an option?

He squeezes the steering wheel so hard it groans.

May Cay resides in a grim industrial strip where, to the benef it of neither community, Glendale blends into Burbank. Years past, the site belonged to a team from Disney creating attractions for theme parks. There are still rusting collections of model roller-coasters in a corner of the parking lot—which is empty, save for Pham’s tricked-out van.

James pulls in, and gives way to rage again, pummeling the steering wheel, groaning, weeping—but only for a few seconds.

He wipes his eyes and gets out of the Prius, close to laughing at the outburst. Jesus, time travel. Ikelos. Not worth the energy he has expended.

And he still has to pee.

James emerges from the car and makes a fast trot into the building—eerily dark and still—as he ponders May Cay’s “routine game-changing concept.”

It is nothing less than an attempt to meld machine and plant—“a silicon-carbon mashup” to use one of their marketing terms. To give organic materials (moss was 90

Michael Cassutt

Asimov’s
working best so far) the ability to support silicon operations. “Vineware” is what Pham calls the operating system; “combine” is James’ contribution to the processor that runs it.

On the surface, they are an unlikely team: Pham is a coder from Irvine, James a computer business guy from IBM, then Google. They met at a conference in San Jose ten years back, and after a considerable number of vodka tonics one night, fell into a game of “you think that’s crazy” that led to May Cay—the Vietnamese words for “machine” and “plant.”

As James opens the back door to May Cay he finds Pham waiting and looking impatient. “Where the hell have you been all day?”

Pham is fifty, short and even stouter than James, and dresses as though he still lived in a college dorm. (From what James knows of Pham’s home life, this isn’t wrong.) Due to multiple sclerosis, he also walks with rusted metal crutches. “Doctor stuff.” James has told Pham about the sleepwalking, though no details about Ikelos and Kolora’s “treatment.” “Why?”

Pham waves his cell phone. His default setting was excitable; today he seemed to be cranked up to eleven. “We got an offer!” James guesses.

“Yeah, from some outfit I’ve never heard of . . . what’s wrong with you?”

James realizes he is hopping from one foot to the other like a, well, like an eight-year-old. “Gotta piss.”

“For Christ’s sake, get it done and meet me in the greenhouse.”

James takes two steps down the hallway. “Who is this mystery outfit, by the way?”

“Something called AGC.”

James wants to rush directly to the greenhouse—AGC? The three mystery letters from his timewalk? But hydraulic pressure has precedence.

He relieves himself in the small bathroom down the hall, pondering the meaning of this AGC business as he considers, for the hundredth time, the decisions that have placed him in this darkened environment.

They keep the lights low or off, to save money. New expenses are not their problem; it’s the old ones and the bills they continue to generate. Some arrive via e-mail, but just as many are still windowed envelopes filling the mailbox or slipping under the door.

Pham suggested leaving them to accumulate, but James is too old school and masochistic for that. He opens, reads, and sorts all the bills, those from suppliers, which largely don’t worry him, and those from their contractors—which do. (At various times in his work he has had to chase money that was owed him, and he hates making others do it now.)

Every collection forces him to do the calculations yet again. How much money he is willing to distribute from his pension plan, and when. He had put aside a decent amount . . . fifteen years back. But one recession, a divorce, his daughter’s needs, and now those of May Cay, have reduced it by two thirds. Every month James is forced to visit the bank and remove several thousand dollars more. Not only is each withdrawal a nagging reminder of his grim determination, but it’s a tax hit as well. He had structured the early withdrawals as personal loans, but he has reached the limit on that option: now it is just money out in the increasingly vain hope that somehow, someday, it will be replaced.

Three weeks ago, following a series of meetings by different representatives, May Cay received a buy-out offer from Lightning Rod, a Bay Area venture capital firm.

The money was significant, but the drawback was a set of conditions that James and Pham couldn’t accept: they would have to give up their product and relinquish all control.

Timewalking

91

November/December 2017

Once he’s through in the bathroom, James takes his time heading for the greenhouse. He calls these his Schrödinger Moments—he doesn’t know yet whether he’s dead (the offer is only surface good) or alive (this is something they will take, and solve all their financial problems)—and he wants to cherish this one.

Pham’s workshop—the greenhouse—was busy a year ago, with half a dozen contractor-coders and one genius technician. Now it’s a collection of empty cubicles and demo/display space.

Pham’s personal station features a bigass Lenovo all-in-one, various remotes and controllers, and a stack of ancient video games. (Where had he found Halo 2? And why?) He is here now, sticks parked, happily in his chair, tapping on his keyboard.

James leans on the partition and gestures for Pham to make his presentation.

“Before I even open this,” Pham says, “I want your promise that you will read to the end before you say a word. Before you think a thought.”

The conditions of last month’s Lightning Rod offer so offended James that he had stormed away from the computer before Pham could finish reading them.

James nods. He waits. The message opens.

He reads.

The offer is, as Pham advertised, signif icantly less than the seven f igures that Lightning Rod has put on the table. As in six figures.

“Well, it’s another offer.”

“Look at the conditions,” Pham said, with surprising enthusiasm. “We keep control.”

James is reading. “We’re partners—”

“—Who know the technology.”

Pham is more of a control freak than he is. James says, “Notice anything about that figure?”

“Other than the fact that it’s missing a decimal point?”

“It’s exactly—and I mean within a thousand dollars—exactly the amount of money we’ve spent so far.”

Pham stares at the offer. “I’ve been trying not to think about that.” While Pham has contributed several hundred thousand dollars in sweat equity, he has not written the checks.

James says, “Do we have any idea who AGC is?”

Pham actually squirms. “While you were emptying your bladder I did a quick search. They don’t show up anywhere.”

“How is that possible?” Pham is an obsessive hacker with skills worthy of a character in a TV procedural.

“They could be just really, really new.”

“As in formed yesterday?”

Pham closes the window. “What do you want to do?”

“I’m sure inclined to consider this, but I’d also like to have some notion that it’s real.”

“Let me perform some due diligence.”

“Tarry not,” James says.

Driving home to Altadena, James tries to call Kolora, but only hears a robo-voiced message. He is unsettled, so much so that he heats up dinner in what could only be described as a state of fury.

After his take-out dinner, he goes to bed as usual—James even feels optimistic that he will sleep peacefully, and that tomorrow will be the day—

At one-thirty he is still shifting around, half-dozing.

By nature James is not only a cup half-empty sort, but possibly the type who snaps, who asked for a cup to begin with? He sees the downside all too easily, and this habitual darkness surely kept him from real success in the IT world, too.

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Asimov’s

He’s also unwilling to allow others to not only play in a sandbox of his design but to even know it exists. This is the reason he and Pham have resisted Lightning Rod’s buy-out so far.

But under it all, he just wants to be known for something, some breakthrough, some magic. This is what May Cay is for him.

He wraps himself in a blanket and sits in front of the television, prepared to watch infomercials and golf from China until dawn.

At some point he falls asleep.

He is back in the tidy house on 12th, though years later, home from college in Tempe for a couple of weeks. He has just come in from somewhere, likely a bar.

Oh, yes, he was at Len’s, where his old high school girlfriend introduced him to her roommate at UW-Lacrosse . . . Bethany Dahl, who became his first wife.

But dear God and this must be due to the beer, he has to urinate again—

He awakens in the darkened kitchen, where he has his hand on the door that leads into the garage. He is remembering that junior year at college, the change of majors, the actual letters he would begin writing to Bethany.

They might be stored in the garage, but what would they have to do with his current obsessions?

He glances at the clock on the stove: 04:49.

He returns to the bedroom, not the couch, and crawls under the covers, determined to remain there—awake or asleep—until seven A.M.

On the drive to May Cay, James remembers his pride at the acquisition of their building, four years back, at their ability to hire staff and become a legitimate, if small entity. At the fascinating strange processors that came and went in the greenhouse. At seeing his dream taking shape.

And being able to help Pham, who had been buried in dead-end tech development, realize some of his dreams, too.

His partner is in the greenhouse tinkering, their prize combine prototype in pieces, circuits and hardware to one side of the bench, organics to the other.

Typically, Pham has no idea James is present—and out of some vague sense that an era is ending, James watches him at work.

They are so different. While the whole concept of vineware was James’s, he would score zero as a Jeopardy contestant if the category happened to be items that grew.

His knowledge of trees is limited to knowing the difference between pines and maples. (He could not name more than two of the incredible variety of trees and flowers that beautified the Los Angeles area . . . when pressed on this once by Pham he had snapped, “I can appreciate the night sky without knowing a single constellation.”

(“Yes,” Pham had said, “but you’d be a savage.”)

It was Pham who brought a love of flowers and trees to May Cay.

Finally, James knocks on a partition. “Should I ask what this is, or go out and pretend I never came in?”

“I was just tinkering.”

“Anything useful?”

Pham shrugs, nods toward the combine. “I think we’ve been aiming at low-hanging fruit—”

“Almost literally,” James says, to no response.

“—by designing what is basically just a world-wide processor.” The casual phras-ing, accurate but wildly incomplete, stabs at James. “It got me thinking about whether you could apply 3D printing to the concept.”

Having no real idea what Pham means, James waits. “I don’t just want to manip-ulate data . . . what about manipulating matter?”

Timewalking

93

November/December 2017

James sees the possibilities instantly—it is like one of his reactive decisions: the 3D printer version of the vineware processor would theoretically allow you to re-shape . . . anything. A field. A building.

A planet? If, if, if it worked.

“Wow, sounds promising.” What the hell should he say? “It seems as though you’re moving beyond May Cay and vineware.”

“Just filling the time until you got here.” Pham has hauled himself over to his station and tapped the keyboard. “Behold.”

James peers at the screen.

AGC.

“You found them.”

“They’re quite new. In fact, I think they only showed up in the databases in the last day.” This triggers an alarm in James’ mind. “But according to the usual sources, they do exist, and they do have money.”

“Where are they based?”

“Some P.O. box in Delaware.”

“So they’re good for their offer, low as it is.”

“As good as Lightning Rod is for its much larger one, yeah.”

“Are there people involved? Or are we being bought by an artificial intelligence?”

“Unless you pay, you can’t get that info.” He hands James a piece of paper. “But I was able to pull together a side-by-side. Some of their work.”

James’ eyes immediately find a familiar name among half a dozen AGC beneficiaries.

An entity named Ikelos.

James feels as though he’s been punched. Pham sees this. “Something wrong?”

“I need to run downtown,” he says, offering no additional explanation.

He drives to the station, buys a pass, boards the Metro without registering anything about his surroundings. As he rides, he examines the possible connections between the AGC offer and Ikelos. Performing the obvious math, he grows more suspicious with every mile.

Ikelos reaches out to him. Kolora lulls him. The name AGC appears in a timewalk—because of Kolora?

AGC offers to buy May Cay for a suspiciously precise amount.

AGC didn’t exist, now it does.

Is this all some plot to sabotage May Cay—who gains? As far as he and Pham know, no one is duplicating their work, or even trying to. Any entity interested in their vineware would do as AGC is doing.

Buy them.

Only when the Metro reaches downtown does he add this timewalking business to the stew.

He, James, this year, this month, this week, is not only signaling 1962 and 1974
and possibly 1988 James . . . he is signaling James This Week.

So what message is he trying to send?

It has to be about the May Cay sale. It’s so fucking obvious he feels stupid for not having realized it.

And it can only be one of two things: take the deal.

Or don’t take it.

Because . . . ? That’s where it gets mushy and improbable, the idea that some decision of his could be that important. Yes, in the movie of his life, he would be making decisions of such importance that some future assassin would be stalking him.

But he doesn’t believe in that movie. He is sixty-plus, his surviving buddies joke about what’s going to get them. Stroke? Cancer? Heart attack? Some horrible degenerative 94

Michael Cassutt

Asimov’s
disease like ALS? (Lately prostate trouble has become James’ #1.) Car crash?

It’s going to be something like that, not a grim guy in a dark suit and sunglasses from the year 2084.

In spite of his scorn for the dramatic, James takes a cautious approach on his return to Kolora’s office, ascending on foot through ten floors, wondering how many of these offices belong to Ikelos and its associates operating under cover names. All of them? James knows that this building used to house servers during an earlier downtown rebirth. Maybe these doors hide a phalanx of quantum computers.

Or maybe just artists, app developers, downtown fringers.

As he is about to knock, the door opens—which he finds doubly startling, given the circumstances. It’s Kolora herself.

“Surprise,” he says, not hiding the sarcasm.

Her response is wary shading into hostile. “It is.”

She doesn’t step aside. They remain in the doorway. “I called you last night.”

“So I saw.”

“Hot date?” Come to think of it, she is wearing what she was wearing yesterday.

He has a frightening thought: she’s a time traveler! She went back to the future or wherever the hell she came from. In her timeline, James’ abrupt departure was only a minute ago the—

No, she looks red-eyed, sleep-deprived, almost haggard, and not from too much fun, either.

“I don’t believe you came here at nine in the morning to ask me about my personal life.”

Her manner disarms him. “Sorry I bolted.”

She regards him. “Are you here to resume your session?”

A sudden realization. “I’m actually not carrying any cash.”

“That’s not an issue if you’re in real distress—”

“What do the letters AGC mean to you? And how is Ikelos connected?”

Kolora stands aside. “Come in.”

As she leads him in to the loft, James notes the sleepwalking equipment. “One moment,” Kolora says, tapping her phone.

The door at the end of the loft opens, and three men emerge. The age range is twenties to upper forties. The older man seems to be Pakistani; the other two are Latino. All have that perpetually distracted look of IT workers.

All three seem uneasy.

“James Follet, meet Ikelos,” Kolora says. “Derek, Luis, Emilio.”

They offer handshakes, greetings. Seeing their generic clothing and blended eth-nicity, hearing their neutral accents, it’s tempting to think of them as emissaries from the future.

James leans on Kolora’s desk. This is partly a deliberate maneuver, well practiced, to establish his authority. It’s also a concession to nagging back pain. “Hello, Ikelos.

How do all of you connect with this mysterious entity AGC?”

“They fund our work,” Luis says, after receiving a nod of permission from Kolora.

“I know that,” James snaps. “But who are they? Is there a Mr. A, a Mrs. G? Does AGC just mean ‘All God’s Children’?” He gets an idea. “Are those initials from your family names?”

“Nothing as useful as that,” Kolora says. “Derek is the only one who actually knows them—”

“Him, rather,” Derek says. He is the oldest of the three. “Three years ago I met with one man who represents a pool of individual investors.”

Timewalking

95

November/December 2017

“And?”

“He was older, a lawyer of some kind. He’d found us I don’t know how.”

“And he just put up . . . a few hundred thousand dollars a year for failed sleepwalk therapy?” He is about to say, where do I sign up? Until he remembers that AGC is trying to sign him up.

“We’d just formed Ikelos,” Kolora says. “We’re all sleepwalkers. We were working independently and decided to team up.” James would like to know more, but his own experience with May Cay and venture capital firms is actually similar.

“It’s nice that they keep the money flowing, given that you haven’t found a cure.”

“We don’t use that word. Think of this like Alcoholics Anonymous. One day at a time.”

“You mean one night at a time.” Not one of them laughs. “If your treatment isn’t working, why persist?”

“Because it’s more than an affliction—”

“—It’s a mission!” That from Luis, the youngest of the men, and the jumpiest.

James sees that the three men have separated and taken up positions at noon, three, and six o’clock, effectively boxing him in. “To do what?”

Kolora sighs, clearly knowing how the next words will be taken. “To save the future.”

“From what?”

Now it’s Emilio speaking. He is older than Luis, younger than Derek, almost surely ponderous. “People and objects can’t travel through time, but it appears that information can. Kolora’s work has already established that for years, going back to the age of eight, you, James, have been receiving messages, impressions, information from yourself. In the future.”

This isn’t the craziest notion he has heard in his life. “Okay, and whatever that means, some cryptic messages from current me to past me—why would I be timewalking now?”

Luis steps forward. “Because your future self is still trying to tell you something.”

“Well, I always was a slow learner.” He smiles, but now he is really uncomfortable.

But he tries to play the game. “What about the rest of you? Are your future selves trying to signal you?”

Kolora and Luis overlap. “More or less.” “It’s happening to every sleepwalker.”

James stands up straight. “Everyone who has ever sleep-walked? Millions of people going back a hundred thousand years are actually being contacted by some future version of themselves? Before anyone ever invented your machine? Is that your story?”

No one rushes to answer. “The theory,” Luis finally says, “is still under construction.”

“No fooling.”

“And our machine only enhances the experience,” Kolora says. “It obviously takes place spontaneously.”

Emilio clears his throat. “We believe that there’s a genetic component to timewalking. It may not be you making contact, but your descendants.”

James turns to him. “Now you’re just depressing me. I thought that the fact that I was still having episodes was proof I was going to be around past next week.” He f inds it diff icult to avoid sarcasm. “Why would anyone do this? Genealogical research? Hijinks?”

“All of the above,” Kolora says. “Or—” She pauses, seemingly unwilling to say more.

Apparently Luis senses this, too. “To try to change things. To send warnings.”

“Changing the past? I have serious problems with that notion.”

Kolora regains her power of speech. “We do, too, unless these messages from the future actually shaped what happened.”

“So it really makes no difference—”

“It does here and now,” Kolora says. “We can choose to act on what we learn.”

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Asimov’s

“Fascinating possibility,” James says. He has suddenly grown tired of this game, but sees no easy exit.

“We’ve all been dreaming about you,” Luis says.

For a moment, James doesn’t believe what he’s just heard. But as a unit, Kolora and the others group together, their posture and expressions so similar, pleading yet convincing, that he doesn’t need to ask again. “What about me?”

Kolora says, “At various times in our lives, we’ve all heard your name, or seen you at work—”

“—with somebody named Pham,” Luis says.

“Wow.”

“Oh, the settings are wildly different,” Kolora says, growing impatient with Luis.

“Even your appearance. But we have experienced some basic message about James Follett, about Pham, and some crisis that our future selves or descendants want to affect.”

“Sure thing,” James says, falling back on jocularity. “Just tell me what I need to do.”

“That’s the problem,” Kolora says. “We don’t know. None of it is really clear.”

“Then timewalking’s not very fucking useful, is it?” He immediately regrets his harshness; these young people may be deluded, but they also seem earnest. “Sorry.

What would you like me to do?”

There was no sign of consultation among the four. “You should resume your session,” Kolora says.

He is still formulating an agreeable answer when his phone chirps with a text alert. As one, Kolora and the three members of her team reach for theirs in various pockets or, in Kolora’s case, the top of her desk.

“It’s me,” James says. The text is from Pham:

LIGHTNING ROD WITHDRAWING OFFER UNLESS WE ACCEPT BY 5 P.M. TOMORROW

He is annoyed, because now he’s curious about Ikelos and timewalking and what it means to the movie of his life. But this is a priority. “I’m needed elsewhere,” he says, waving the phone and rising from the couch.

With what seems to be sorrow, Kolora opens the door.

He covers the trip to the elevator in a dozen steps. He makes the quick drop to the street, and heads out into the foggy sunshine.

His back hurts, probably from the pounding he took climbing the concrete stairs.

But it’s gone in a moment.

He keeps walking, pleased that he doesn’t have to urinate.

Pham is in the greenhouse, closing the case on the combine prototype, when James arrives. “Lightning Rod’s put a clock on us?”

Pham labors his way to his computer. “Take a look.”

James reads the latest e-mail, which is short but unmistakable. “. . . RECENT REVELATIONS ABOUT COMPETING RESEARCH . . .” “. . . FORCED TO REEVALUATE . . .”

His back spasms again. Okay, maybe he is internalizing stress. He straightens up.

“At least they aren’t lowering the offer.”

“Not yet,” Pham says. “I have a friend who sold them an app. They did the same thing . . . hit him out of the blue with a good offer but wanting everything. When he stalled, they gave him a deadline—and then the offer dropped by three-quarters.”

Which would still be an improvement over AGC’s, though not nearly enough to repay James and Pham.

“War game this for me,” James says. “How could vineware be misused?”

This was the kind of question Pham loved. “Well, in one sense it’s like any tool—a shovel can help you farm, but you can also conk your enemy on the skull.

“It’s the internet times ten or a hundred or any significant multiplier you want. The combine and vineware could transform the entire planet into one organic network Timewalking

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November/December 2017
that may be indifferent to our needs, or outright hostile. And who could blame them?

Or it?”

“Like the Singularity and Artificial Intelligence meets Gaia.”

“Sure.” He turns to face James, finally engaging directly. “Why do you ask?”

“Maybe we should take less money and keep control.”

Pham shakes his head. “Come on, man, control is an illusion. Beside . . . much as we’d like to, we can’t live forever. The only way to be sure something bad doesn’t happen with vineware and the combine is to destroy all this . . .” And here he smiled.

“And kill us.”

“There is a ruthless clarity to that.”

“So what do we do, boss?” Pham always calls him “boss” when he means “barely tolerated elder partner.”

“We give this deadline some careful consideration.”

“And make up our minds tomorrow by, say, noon? Because this is starting to affect my sleep. I even had a dream where I was walking.”

James stands behind the closed door, awash in shame and regret, achingly aware of the peeling paint on the walls, how shabby the house looks close-up.

He has indulged his own needs and goals and ignored those of his ex and daughter.

At an age where he should be retired, letting young people change the world, he is still angling for the big score. And why? For fortune? Lightning Rod holds out that possibility. And with AGC there might be fame.

He heads for the kitchen but only pauses long enough to return to the spot where he awoke from his timewalk the night before.

He was headed for the garage. Now he goes in.

As May Cay ramped up and the money drained out, James realized that he might be forced to move. He began to unload books, old magazines, and other totems of sixty years, but held onto several bankers’ boxes filled with letters and notebooks, some dating back to childhood.

And one to college.

He finds it quickly on the garage shelves.

Inside are several term papers, a 1974 course catalogue, his actual student I.D.

and his first checkbook, with a register showing regular checks cashed for ten dollars every Friday.

A cache of letters from Bethany Dahl, and some of those he sent her.

And a spiral notebook with spaceship drawings and his first computer programs.

Not sure what he is in search of, he flips through everything, opening each envelope though largely resisting the urge to re-read.

Finally he has every page out and arrayed on the shelf.

The last item he withdraws from the box is a piece of paper from a yellow legal pad. It is folded in half, the writing concealed. He unfolds it, reads several horrific lines in blue ink of an attempt at a poem.

At the bottom of the page, written across the lines at a ninety-degree angle, in a black not blue ink, are the words: “Sleepwalk—AGC not Lightning Rod.”

He knows that he should freak out. Gasp, roar, maybe faint. But all he does is read and reread and reread.

The words do not change. And the black ink seems as faded as the blue.

Well, he thinks, strangely, calmly, that’s one way to send information backward through time.

Now he really feels the need to urinate.

As he slides the box back into place and turns away, he feels the mother of all spasms 98

Michael Cassutt

Asimov’s
in his back. That’s what he gets for spending an hour in a crouch reading old papers.

He gets himself to the kitchen and a dose of ibuprofen, then to the bathroom.

Even though the painkillers are doing their work, James moves carefully. The slow motion allows him to evaluate this new information.

He cannot believe it.

Yet he cannot disbelieve it.

It is a pleasant morning, cool but sunny. No more rain in the forecast.

His back is tender, a reminder of last night’s excavations. That aside, James feels good, in control.

It is gratifying to believe that he could ensure the safety of the human race from the dark possibilities of vineware by making a sacrifice, transforming himself into a hero to generations yet unborn. That’s a movie most men and women would want to star in.

And yet—how real are these “messages” from his future “self”? What other devices is Ikelos using on him? Or, really, how hard would it have been for Kolora or her allies to plant that piece of paper in his garage?

At 8:30, Pham’s usual arrival time at the greenhouse, James dials his cell.

“May Cay, Pham.”

“It’s me.”

“How reassuring.” Pham reverts to sarcasm when nervous.

“How’d you sleep?”

“Like shit.”

“Have you got the Lightning Rod offer on screen?”

“Only for the past sixteen hours.”

James closes his eyes. If he were thirty years younger—or even ten—the decision would be more challenging. He would still feel that he has other possibilities. But this is for his ex, his daughter. His fucking legacy.

“Unless you object now, I vote for Lightning Rod.”

“No objection. And before you can change your mind—”

James can hear the click. “It’s done,” Pham says. “God bless us every one.”

Good-bye May Cay and vineware. As for the future, you’re going to have to take care of yourself.

He’s old, not stupid. ❍

Timewalking

99

SKIPPED

Emily Taylor

Emily Taylor’s short fiction has appeared in such venues as

Ecotone, Green Mountains Review: The Apocalypse Issue,
and Menda City Review. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

“Skipped” came about as a departure from less-speculative writing during that peculiar time of sleepless new parenting, and the idea of living a different and altered life through a twist of the Universe is reflected in the story.

Suddenly, I wasn’t alone in my transport compartment. A man appeared sitting across from me, materialized from nothing.

“What’s happening?” I whispered, pulling my arms over my head, protecting myself. We were deep in acceleration and the stars were pouring by in streams. Ripples of light from the transport track bent in through the windows, and I could smell the musky density of bio-fuel pass through the compartment.

“Have a bad dream, babe?” the new man asked, also in a whisper. I studied his face. He was silent (thank goodness), and I was not afraid of him, just curious. He started whistling a favorite old song of mine (how did he know?), “Paper Moon,” from the time of stiff hair and stiff drinks, and he winked at me. The compartment smelled of morning—caffeine and burnt toast—and we seemed comfortable in it (our screens were strewn about, my shoes were unlaced). This new us. This wasn’t my life and this wasn’t my man, and yet it was. Then I realized what was happening. It wasn’t some kind of stroke or abduction.

“This is awkward,” I said. “But one of us has skipped.”

Skipped.

You click to accept a waiver when you buy your ticket on the transport, promising that you won’t sue the Corporation. Like a rock skipping across the surface of the water, it’s a glitch. The architects were a little off on their quantum measurements when building our high-speed transport around the station. You hit a space-time pocket and get twisted to a different tail in the braid of the multiverse. It’s rare. In other words, you have a slight chance of changing places with another you, if you both happen to be on the transport at the same time. Cells correspond to similar cells. Alternative universes. It’s a thing, it turns out. It’s like getting caught in a rip-tide (from what I can recall of the ocean) and emerging on the wrong surface. And it’s not like you can end up on Mars—you can only jump to a universe where they built this same transport with the same glitch. Sibling universes. Probably there are plenty of universes where they built the thing right, and people just complain about the transport running late, and running too many advertisements for dry shampoo and chemistry tutoring services.

Skipped.

“My gods, really?” he said.

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“We need to f igure out which one of us . . .” I said. I forced myself to slow my breathing. “I’m the one who’s disoriented, so it’s probably me.”

“I just showed up in here for you?”

I nodded. “I was alone, before,” I said. The transport was slowing. The station rotated suddenly, and the Moon, the clear face of it, from my childhood, was there.

“It’s like you’re her, but not,” he said. I imagined he was starting to panic now that his partner had been replaced by a doppelgänger, but all I could see, for the moment, was the Moon.

“Luna isn’t mined,” I said. I reached my hand out toward the brilliance. I was used to networks of dark metal machinery and hubs of energy collectors sitting on the surface, shuttles hovering back and forth as they zoomed to station docks. Here it was pristine instead, a bright disc, the curves of craters visible.

“So it’s you then. Who has skipped,” he whispered. He rubbed his palms against his face, which I couldn’t help but notice was the sort of beautiful face I have always loved, different planes and angles fit together under hair that was complex, dreads and streaks of gray shot through with dyed colors. Short beard framing beautiful lips.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” my partner said. The man who I started out the day with. In my original universe. His face, too, was angular when we met, but has softened now. He said that about a week ago, give or take the way we rotate on the station, like twisting in the wind (from what I can recall of wind), not quite lined up with the Earth. Time is malleable. For the week I’d been mulling it over in waves of nausea. How much longer. I was thinking about it, of course, before I was zipped over to the neighboring universe by accident.

“This is our life,” I said. I may have sneered. This was our son.

We had been nicely avoiding the situation since then. By that, I mean we were co-existing politely but not really speaking. He had bought me a croissant from my favorite vendor on Luna, where he had a small business manufacturing connective platforms for the station. I filed the bills in our shared e-alert folder for what had been deducted from our joint account instead of letting them pile up. We didn’t make eye contact, and we didn’t touch each other in bed.

The problem was Jax. He was thirteen and acting like the explosion of growth that was happening to him. Our son was hanging out with the types of neurogoths that would have scared the living daylights out of me if I hadn’t known they were just mixed up kids, looking for a place to belong. They would tie their arms to their bodies with cords, kicking the consoles to open doors in the main passageways so that no records could be kept of their fingerprints. They would close their eyes rather than look at screens. They did teenage rebellion right. They did it in ways we couldn’t have done because of how things were in the beginning after we got to the station.

We worked when we were their age—planting, fixing solar panels, maintaining the knowledge archive, operating the churns at water f iltration. Now so much of that was automated.

“Honey, they know who you are by your feet too,” I said, when I found the cords hidden in an inner pocket of his pants.

“I could use the cords to choke people,” he said. There were no weapons of any sort allowed on the station. Now I knew why.

“Who do you want to choke?” I asked.

“Myself, mostly, because I’m just a waste of oxygen,” he said. He looked at me for a long time, watching that land.

There were interviews of the first ones who had skipped into the here-now on the way in. It happened every other year or so. At f irst each incident was splashed Skipped

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through the media, and studied by the physicists, but now an occurrence was just a local newsfeed in the quadrant of the space station where it was reported. Sometimes the skipped people f iled for asylum instead of asking to be returned. They talked of plagues or electronic failures that plunged their station into crisis, but most of the time people just talked about who they left behind and about how grateful they were that there was a way back.

The government will open the pocket back up using a matter collider (the Corporation pays), and they pull in the right person and put back the wrong person. It’s just a little incision and stitch-up job on the fabric of reality. We have no idea how they learned to fix the problem (very hush-hush). They tell us it’s not a big deal, and humoring them, and enjoying the high-speed transport around the station, we just go ahead and believe them. But now, I wonder about being pulled through the back-drop of two universes again, and I feel this hum of fear start on my spine. Something might go wrong. Jax needed his father more than ever.

“He’s drawing black circles under his eyes,” I said, just this morning. My partner pulled his tablet down and looked. Then he put his tablet back up to his face. I could see from the f lip of the screen that he was considering purchasing more land on Luna. He rubbed at his bristled hair, sending shocks of static into the dry station air.

Jax walked into the room, the stiff walk of a kid hiding something.

“Turn your arms over,” I said.

On the inside of his left arm: half moons, up and down along his veins. Dug out pieces of flesh. It was grotesque, but it didn’t look like any of the wounds were infected.

“Stop, please,” I said. I tried to pin my eyes on his, so he would see how serious I was.

“I need to do it,” he said. He walked into the kitchen and poured himself some coffee.

“I hope the presentation goes well,” my partner said, toast in his mouth, ignoring our son.

“Thanks,” I said. I didn’t tell him that a little of what they called berry jam had smeared on the outside of his lip. I remembered berries from the surface of the Earth. The last berries that grew on the side of our mountain, swamp berries, really, as the ocean swallowed the swelling river and poured more and more brackish water over the land. The berries were the most delicate taste I had ever experienced in my life. I would never taste it again. We didn’t have the real estate to grow bushes like that up here—we just fortified hybrid fruit. Frankenfruit, we called it. We all wished for things like that and buried it. But not well enough, it seemed, to stop our children from longing for what they couldn’t have.

“You left me the butt of the bread,” Jax said. “Nice.” It was one of the first direct communication I’d had from him in a week.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said. “I’m giving that presentation for the blue quadrant.”

“Great,” Jax said. He took his toast to his room. If he could have slammed a door, he would have, but they’re all hydraulic here. More efficient. I only have the fuzzy memory of a real wooden door on a real house that my grandparents lived in on the surface, but I remember the satisfying sound when it shut. It emphasized something.

My new man’s skin was a rich tan (so different from my partner’s light olive tone), and I could see heat building in an undercurrent to the smooth parts of his cheeks, to the bridge of his nose. There were tears rising and resting. I felt them in my own eyes too. He reached out his hand and the transport rocked a little and our hands wavered together and never touched, and then he drew it back, as if he remembered that he was not with me. Not really.

I turned. With a sudden jolt I saw her. The perfect sleeping child curled on the bench next to me against the window, against the vastness of space, pinpricks of 102

Emily Taylor

Asimov’s
starlight illuminating her. I felt like I

“A new reader of Asimov’s, I cannot
could only inhale, because my lungs
speak to the past, but I can speak to the
wouldn’t let go of the air. A darling child,
future of this magazine. It will continue to
eyes buttoned shut. She was three or four
be important to find readers who are
at most. She had my (her?) curling dark
searching for the answers to the ques-
lashes. Suddenly, the bottom of my heart
tion of what is possible? Asimov’s values
fell open and my love was the size of
not only this question, but also the beau-
every universe I knew. Now I knew two.

ty of the art in the answers, and this is

My new partner came and sat next to
why more new readers will find a home
the perfect child beside me. He pressed
and a beacon here in uncertain times.”

against her.

—Emily Taylor

“I don’t want her to know this is hap-
pening,” he said. He laid his hand on her temple. I drank her down in gulps, eyes passing over each detail, again and again, so I’d never unsee her.

“What’s it like, where you come from?” my new man asked.

“Another place like this place,” I said. “Another station, another life, like this one, but not.”

“No me?” I shook my head no. “And no her?” I didn’t even answer because I didn’t trust my own shaking body.

“It’ll be fine,” he said. “You can apply at the embassy to be sent back. My partner will be doing the same.” He rubbed his hands on his legs.

“I have a son there,” I said. I swallowed with difficulty, my throat tasting suddenly of sand or chalk. “He’s older.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the girl. She was the very picture of the daughter I’d always imagined before Jax was born. In our uncertain times, having more than one child is out of the question. We don’t have many ways to feed ourselves, and if we lost just a little power—say from the impact of space debris, or a mistake at the station controls, a switch snagged, or someone like my son committing sabotage—many of us would starve. Quickly.

“What were you doing on the transport?” he whispered.

“Going to give a presentation. I work in plants. In growing. Does she?”

“She does,” he said. “But we were off to take our daughter for a picnic in the grassland.”

“That sounds nice,” I said. We didn’t have a grassland in our universe. What a lovely idea. I imagined stretching out, toes in dirt, just as I had in my faintest childhood memories. It would not be an eff icient use of station space, but I could see that in this universe, they had made concessions to beauty.

“When will we go back?” Jax asked one time. It was when he was just old enough to look out our cabin window on our planet, a swirl of blue weather and shades of movement that were the alternating depths of the ocean. I held him on my lap with both arms crossed over his small body. When we looked down at the ocean, I always told him there might be a school of whales in charge. That almost certainly wasn’t true. When the shuttles went down to draw water and scoop for dirt, they found bac-teria, plankton, and some signs of bivalves and bottom-feeders, but probably nothing like whales were left. They hadn’t been spotted in decades. The continents were covered, the atmosphere murky and fetid. The marshland of my childhood had disappeared, stilted houses built on mountain plateaus lost to the unrelenting tides.

“I don’t think we will be able to go back,” I told him, finally, that day. The truth.

The government was building more levels on the space station, rings upon rings upon rings of humans and agro-ducts to live on, with air recycled by plants from what we exhaled from our lungs. Our children didn’t know a life any different, but here was my boy, pining for solid ground beneath his feet. He was a landlubber Skipped

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November/December 2017
without a shore to call his own. The day I told him that we couldn’t go back was the last time I remember him weeping in my arms. He howled.

When we reached the transport station and the door opened, I kissed the strange-not-strange new man full on his mouth, feeling the stubble and with my hand, caressing the arms with so much hair trying to burst free from his shirt. I knew why she loved him, and I thought she was luckier in love than I had been. She would be alone in the transport, so she’d never be able to compare. I thought about finding this man again, whoever he was in our universe (if he was in our universe) and then I thought I should never ask his name, so I wouldn’t be tempted. I hugged him, held him close.

“She’d understand,” I said, speaking of the other woman who I was.

“She would,” he said. “She will.” His lips curled a bit into a smile that I knew how much she loved.

“May I?” I asked, gesturing to the child.

“Just don’t wake her,” he said.

I drank in the child when I kissed her. I cradled as much of her in my arms as I could gather. She was heavy with slumber. I could see her past and her future. Her cheeks were mine. Her ears were mine. I memorized her face and burned it into my brain. If only I could see her eyes—but the mother in me was glad that she wouldn’t be trau-matized by this, and I knew how lucky I was (she was?) that the girl was sleeping.

“It’s been a pleasure,” I said to him. “I’ll get her back to you as soon as possible. I’ll report as soon as I find a console. I’m sure she will too.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” he asked. I shook my head no, and I pressed my hand on his.

“Are the kids okay here?” I said. I didn’t want him to know, not really, what Jax was like.

“What do you mean?” he said. The door began to close. It was enough.

I was nowhere near my original destination.

I walked down the long corridor from the transport to the station. People busy with all sorts of business pressed past me, but still I walked slowly. I thought about him, my partner. The first one, number one. His smell was like the residue of sun-bursts on days when the solar f lares were high, mixed with something sweet and rare, like pineapple. My anger at him had gone. Number 2, his smell was something different—pavement after the rain—a smell from my youngest childhood. Both smells were enticing and invoked a hunger.

I felt rolls of panic start to come over me like the long vibrations of the transport.

I clutched my own hands to make sure they were mine. They were, mostly. There was a curved scar along one knuckle. I missed my boy too, not my boy from this morning, but the one who used to sleep against me, like that soft dead weight in my arms of the little girl—the perfect weight for anything to be.

I was at the end of the corridor. I found a kiosk. I imagined if my partner had been the one who skipped, perhaps he’d have walked away from us. It made me shiver.

“I need to report a skip,” I said to the console.

“For yourself, or for another?”

“Myself,” I said.

“Were there any injuries?”

“No.”

“Do you wish to seek asylum?” I clutched the titanium of the pole in front of me, watching the stars through the window. People pulsed against me, trying to get to wherever they were going. I wondered if skipping was underreported—if people just walked away from their lives, in both universes.

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Asimov’s

“No,” I said. My throat felt dense. I thought about how I’d never see Beatrice again in any kind of life. I pressed my hand against my mouth. I was certain that was her name, because it was the name I had wanted for a daughter from the very beginning of my life, until Jax was born.

“Do you wish to provide a report for the public record?” the console asked.

“Yes,” I said. This here-and-now was a little more detail-driven than our own.

”Please wait for a Corporation representative,” the console said. A door slid open, and I passed through to an observation chamber. The Corporation on our side had these spaces too, for meetings and receptions and special events. I had been inside on rare occasions. Through the windows in our residences, we can only see the Earth at a distance, but in the chambers the windows magnify the surface. I stepped forward and I could see the different depths of the oceans and the wreckage of a few tall cities, skyscrapers salt-whitened and crusted beacons. But there, in the center of what used to be a continent, a dark green blot, with shuttles moving back and forth.

Bio-massing was happening here. Plants were being grown on the surface. They were trying to make another go of it.

This was something we’d given up on in our universe. I could tell Jax there might be a way back down to the surface. I felt the urgency of getting back to tell Jax everything. I could tell him that if he worked very hard for it (as we had worked hard to keep ourselves alive in orbit) he might be able to homestead on the planet, to breathe free air. Perhaps that would sustain him long enough to emerge from this blight and to look us in the eyes.

I sat on a bench and waited to be summoned by the embassy. Slowly, the station shifted in orbit. I waited by the light of the clean Moon. ❍

Skipped

105

AFLOAT ABOVE

A FLOOR OF

STARS

Tom Purdom

Tom Purdom tells us, “I’m still recovering from the accident that bruised and inflamed parts of my spinal cord, so I could say that the major recent events in my life included things like the discovery I can once again drink a cup of coffee with my right hand. But I should also note that since the accident, I’ve produced about fifty pieces on music and other matters for Philadelphia’s broadstreetreview.com, continued to write science fiction, and attended about ninety concerts featuring the best music created between 1300 and 2017. I think I’ve made the transition from victim to survivor.” Of his latest tale he says, “This is my second attempt at a story that postulates faster than light travel—a concept I’ve avoided for most of my writing career. It marries a new idea about FTL with an idea about the future of gender relations that’s been lurking in my brain for a couple of decades.”

Revali liked the alter while he was in it, but he always exited it feeling like he was slipping out of an unsettling dream. He could see the change in Kemen’s attitude as his baseline personality emerged and the temporary personality faded.

Kemen was sitting at the oversize desk in the medical room, staring at the big screen that told her the state of all his systems and subsystems. She had been eyeing him while she monitored the screen but she fixed her eyes on the numbers when his expression and his body language told her he was approaching his default mode.

Was she lamenting the loving, companionable male who had kept her company for the last thirty-five tendays? Could he blame her? He had felt a mild sense of loss the last time Kemen had shed her alter.

“You’re right where you’re supposed to be,” Kemen said. “No anomalies.”

“Thank you.”

She stood up. She was a tall, well-proportioned woman and she was willing to look imposing when she thought she needed to.

“I’ve made up my mind,” Kemen said. “I’m not going to do the ceremony. I can’t do it.”

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Revali looked up at her. She had obviously acted while she could tower over him, but he didn’t stand up.

“I think I need to spend a little time alone,” Revali said.

“That’s a final decision. I wanted to tell you right away.”

They were now 882 days from altitude. They were supposed to spend the entire 882 days in their baseline personalities. 882 days wasn’t eternity. But it wasn’t tomorrow either. The argument wasn’t over.

Kemen had become his shipmate because Revali’s fundraiser had told him he had to take her. “I can’t do this without the Desha money,” Ulvan Gorbav said. “Benduin Desha is the only person I’ve encountered who’s willing to put up serious money. The small donor appeal has gotten us to 49 percent. I can guarantee that’s as far as it’s going to go. Everybody agrees you’re peddling a beautiful, poetic idea. But Dama Desha seems to be the only person in the solar system who thinks poetry deserves real money.”

Ulvan applied the honorific dama with his usual mixture of irony and respect. He spent a lot of his time with rich people. He had even become one.

“But I have to take Kemenangan See if I take Benduin Desha’s money,” Revali said.

“Kemenangan See is number three on your list. Her research aims may not be world shattering, but my consultants tell me they’ll add a respectable scientific purpose to the project.”

“Does Dama Desha know Dr. See wants me to alter myself for eighty tendays?”

“She does. And she also knows Dr. See will be altering herself for eighty tendays if you accept the agreement. Dama Desha thinks that’s a wonderful idea. You will each experience another way to be human.”

Revali shook his head. “I would be perfectly happy if we did the entire trip in our baseline personalities. I’ve lived with three women who were autonomous self-governing individuals and I never felt the need for anything else.”

“But then you’d be practicing your lifechoice and demanding Dr. See practice it with you for the whole thirty-six year round trip. I’m afraid Dama Desha has decided the personality alterations are an important aspect of the whole project. She’s also said she would be willing to consider funding if you gave yourself a long term modification for the entire round trip and traveled with another man.”

Ulvan noted the flicker of emotion that traveled across Revali’s face. Ulvan had made a major alteration in his own personality near the end of his first century. He had never been able to deal with women, he claimed. They were a complete mystery. His life had become much simpler and happier when he had changed his sexual preference.

“That doesn’t appeal to you,” Ulvan said. “Believe me, getting along with another male is a thousand times easier.”

“I think I like the tension created by significant difference,” Revali said. “Does Kemenangan See have any reservations about the ceremony?”

“She’s an ambitious young woman. You’ll be giving her the big breakout she’s looking for. I don’t know how she feels about all this unity chatter but I don’t think she’ll let a little recitation get between her and her future.”

How could you prepare for a voyage that would place two people in complete isolation for thirty-six years? The literature on the subject—such as there was—didn’t offer any definitive conclusions. Revali had suggested they should avoid each other as much as possible, and Kemen had agreed. Their shipboard living arrangements had mostly been negotiated by Ulvan and Kemen’s agent. Revali could still see the wariness on Kemen’s face when they started their first routine day on the ship, with all the windows covered and the monitors advising them the drive had reached maximum.

Afloat Above a Floor of Stars

107

November/December 2017

They had divided the trip into a series of awakes and hibernations, with periods when they were both awake alternating with periods when one kept watch while the other hibered. They had decided to start with fifty tendays when they would both be awake and unaltered.

Revali wanted to tell Kemen he didn’t bite or pummel, but he knew that wouldn’t work. Instead, he let them go about their business, getting their quarters properly stowed and organized, monitoring all the systems for any sign something wasn’t working properly and they should shut down the hyperlight drive and try to return to the solar system while they could still make the trip in decades instead of centuries. At lunch on the f ifth day he let her give him a lecture on the Banjung-Molovich equations and the operations of the drive they made possible. He didn’t understand either subject very well—and wasn’t that interested—but Kemen had taken the required advance courses when she had worked on her doctorate. Her eyes lit up as she summarized the paradoxes. Her hands traced mathematical curves.

He let her talk until he could honestly plead he had absorbed everything his limited mathematical talents could digest. Then he waited just a little longer—just long enough for her to take a gulp from her glass.

“I think we should talk about our feelings. For each other.”

“I’m not very good at that,” Kemen said.

“Neither am I. At some point I’ll probably develop so much internal resistance I’ll become paralyzed. But I think we have to make the effort.”

“I’m going to do everything I can to cooperate. I’m not going to cause you any trouble. We both want this thing to succeed. What else do you need to know?”

“I get the feeling I make you apprehensive. Wary. I think we should discuss that.”

“I asked for this. I wouldn’t be here if I felt I couldn’t handle the situation.”

“Ulvan wasn’t exaggerating when he told your agent I was used to living with independent women. Most of the women I’ve lived with have probably been just as autonomous as any of the women in your branch.”

“And how do you feel about your alter? Are you looking forward to forty tendays under the rule of a female tyrant?”

Revali smiled. “I don’t think you’re going to be very tyrannical. I know I’m not going to treat you like a concubine when it’s your turn.”

Kemen stood up. She was still eating but she apparently felt she had to reinforce her words.

“We don’t need that kind of talk. I knew what I was doing when I signed the contracts. I’m going to honor my agreement.”

Revali had equipped himself with a secondary modification that relieved some of the limitations of a personality that was basically hard driving, self-centered, and mildly introverted. His parents had both been hard driving, self-centered, and mildly introverted individualists, and they had decided he and his sister should continue the tradition. Revali felt they had, by and large, made the right decision. But there were times when a more sociable personality had its uses.

Kemen was just as hard driving and ambitious, in her way, and they were both trapped in the same irony: they had driven themselves into a thirty-six year stint as passengers on a ship that could take care of all its routine needs without any help from a pair of pathetically limited bipeds. Kemen had packed an encyclopedic course of study in her personal library, but she still moped into the common room every two or three days.

Kemen was used to talking to men who listened to women. You just had to relax and look interested. And let her pick the topics. That should have been obvious, but it took Revali awhile to realize it.

She usually talked about the things she was studying, but he could shift her to 108

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other subjects. He just had to wait until she mentioned something her father had said. She mentioned her father a lot.

Kemen’s father was a large, gentle man. “He was very f irm,” Kemen said. “My mother had definite ideas about the kind of people we were supposed to be when we grew up. But he never yelled at us. He never made us feel like he was trying to control us. We always knew he was doing things for us—that he was thinking about us even when he told us we couldn’t do things we wanted to do.”

“My parents were a lot like that, too,” Revali said. “Their children were the main reason they got married.”

“Is that why they split up?”

“Probably. They stayed together until I was well into adulthood, just like they planned. They’re still doing what they can for me. I don’t need to have them be together. They were ready to move on. Seventy years is a long time.”

“I don’t think my parents will ever separate.”

“I think it’s different with my people. I don’t think we can make marriages that last forever. We can’t connect with somebody who’s a perfect fit.”

“So you go looking for somebody better.”

“Seventy years is a long time. Somebody new can f it you in a different way. Not better. Just different.”

They talked for over an hour. Later he realized she had probably turned on a variation of the secondary modification he had activated. He thought about asking her if she had. And decided not to.

They staged a modest ceremony when the ship passed the one hundred light-year mark 429 days after it had gone hyperlight. Kemen felt they should observe the occasion, and Revali had the ship research its historical databanks and construct a rite that suited its evaluations of their feelings.

The ship positioned them in the common room five minutes before the big moment.

A table supported two glasses filled with a bubbly drink that created a mild emotional lift. The lights dimmed. A position diagram filled the big entertainment stage.

Their position diagrams always showed them rising through the galaxy, the way Revali had visualized the voyage when the idea had first drifted into his mind. Up and down might be arbitrary concepts in space but for him the ship was driving upward, out of the galaxy, to a point three hundred light years “above” the spiral arm that contained the solar system. It was one of the longest interstellar voyages anyone had attempted, and it was essentially a journey to nowhere. Every ship that had left the solar system had been pointed toward a habitable planet or an object that had some scientific interest.

Ulvan Gorbav’s voice reverberated through the room, intoning a passage from one of his fund-raising messages. Our explorers will make a journey of the spirit. They will be the first humans to see our galaxy from the outside. And we will all share in the experience. We could only watch when the first humans saw the Earth from space.

This time we will feel every emotion our explorers feel.

The red dot marking their position flickered. They reached for their glasses and clicked the rims.

The ship followed the ceremony with a lunch served on a red tablecloth with plates decorated with an image of the galaxy. Kemen retreated into her study program right after lunch, but she came looking for him after an hour, claiming she couldn’t settle down. They ended up spending the rest of the day in her room, lying in bed, mostly just being together. Seventy-one days later, Revali initiated the f ive-hour process that would turn him into a temporary version of the kind of man Kemen’s mother had married.

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* * *

Kemen wasn’t a tyrant. For Revali, it was more like the relationship between a doting parent and a spoiled child. She didn’t give him orders. She didn’t make demands. She just assumed he wanted to keep her happy and contented.

It was a very restful modification. Most of his internal tensions had evaporated.

The changes included a reduced sex drive, and he knew that accounted for some of his tranquility. He had experimented with a reduced sex drive when he had been in his thirties, during a time when his relationships with women had become troublesomely turbulent. But there was more to it than that. The modif ication had given him a general shift toward a calmer, less intense response to the world.

Kemen had become calmer, too. She had spent most of her life surrounded by men like her father. Revali’s baseline personality had frightened her more than he had realized. She had talked before when he listened, but now the words came out in a steady stream. Her face lit up when she talked about the things she planned to do when they reached their high point. Her hands darted. She reminded him of the times certain women had listened to him while he talked about his personal dreams.

They talked when she felt like talking. The rest of the time he kept himself busy.

He had exercised for an hour a day, as he was supposed to, before he slipped into the alternate. Now he worked out like he was preparing for a major athletic event. He checked his weight, oxygen intake, and muscle mass three times a day. He spent an hour every other day engaging in simulated unarmed combat. He tightened his muscles when she ran her hand over them. He savored the surge of vitality running through his nerves and arteries.

Kemen was a conf irmed Montalist. The splintering of the human race was inevitable, in her opinion. It might take several centuries, but the process couldn’t be stopped now that it had started. There was no way legacy humans like Revali could build a society both sexes would find acceptable. The men and women who had created the first compatible companions had done something irresistible. The splintering of the human species had become inevitable the moment humans had learned to shape their genes and personalities.

The alternate personality couldn’t change Revali’s basic disagreement with the Montalist position. It merely affected the way he expressed it. It kept him polite and empathetic when she smiled at his inability to understand the obvious.

“How do you feel knowing the solar system contains millions of women who’ve been designed to please men?” Revali asked. “Doesn’t the existence of that other branch bother you?”

“The women in that branch are happy the way they are. Aren’t you happy now?”

“But I know this is only temporary.”

She smiled. “Are you looking forward to changing?”

Revali lowered his head. She made a little nervous gesture with her hand and he reached across the table and ran his fingers across the skin near her wrist.

“You have a point.”

“We may always have some legacies around,” Kemen said. “Little isolated pockets.

But you can’t deny your population is shrinking. Every time one of your people defects, one of the other groups gains. Eventually, we’ll have two species—men with the kind of women men seem to have always wanted, and women partnered with the kind of men women need.”

He squeezed her hand. It was amazing how beautiful she looked. That was one of the unexpected corollaries of the alteration.

“Montali thinks it will be the most peaceful society humans have created,” Kemen said. “We’ll have eliminated one of the major reasons humans have engaged in violence.”

Revali retained the alter for forty tendays. Then he went into hibernation and 110

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Kemen spent forty tendays alone. He resumed his normal personality when he awoke and Kemen assumed her alter.

Kemen had asked him about his experience with women “designed for men” during one of their discussions. She had nodded and smiled when he told her he’d tried it twice, for a couple of tendays each time.

“What made you stop?” Kemen had said. “Were you afraid you were starting to like it?”

“I was still in my twenties the first time. I did it just because I wanted to see what it was like. The second time I’d just ended a bad time with somebody who looked like she was one thing when I met her and turned out to be something else.”

“It’s a natural arrangement. We all want somebody who puts us at the center of their life. It used to be only men could have it. Women had to give it to them. Now both sexes can have it. You quit while you were still fighting your own feelings.”

Kemen had adopted a generic concubine personality when she had assumed her alter. The women Revali had experimented with had presented him with the same kind of personality, and he reacted to Kemen the same way he had reacted to them.

He found himself searching the databanks for distractions by the middle of the third tenday.

“I don’t feel like I’m engaging with a real person,” Revali said. “Somebody with her own desires. Her own goals.”

“I still have my own goals,” Kemen said. “I still spend hours in my own room studying.”

“But you drop it the moment I want your attention.”

She smiled—a quizzical, wide-eyed smile that was nothing like the superior smile that always irritated him.

“Would you like it if I put up some resistance? Is that what you want?”

“You’d still just be doing something because you think I want you to do it. There’s an edge to my relations with legacy women. To my relations with people.”

“I just want you to be happy. I’ll argue with you if that’s what you want. Do you want me to talk about what I’m studying? Right now I’m trying to understand the economics that financed the development of the asteroids. Would I be a better companion for you if I shared that with you? There are times when I’m not sure I really understand some of the financial maneuvers.”

Could he have insisted she shed the alter? Would she have done it because he said he wanted her to do it?

He thought about that, but he didn’t do it. He might be feeling lonely, but he had never needed a steady flow of companionship. She was there when he wanted her.

The rest of the time they could go their separate ways.

She still had her sense of humor. She was still willing to argue with him. Only now it was his turn to do the lecturing.

Once, after one of their more pleasant interludes, he asked her if he was that different from the men she was used to. Hadn’t he made sure she had a good time, too?

Didn’t he think about her feelings and desires?

“You aren’t the only one who’s experimented,” Kemen said. “Every legacy male isn’t like you.”

“And most legacy women don’t like the types you’re probably thinking about. Any more than you do.”

“So why are those types still around?”

“Sometimes women put up with them because they have other qualities. Just like I put up with you in your baseline personality.”

She wiggled against him. Her finger stroked his lips. “Am I that hard to live with?”

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November/December 2017

“Legacy people always have qualities you have to live with. You’re essentially a legacy woman when you’re in your baseline personality. The men in your branch may be modified, but you aren’t. The women in your branch are legacy women who gave up trying to work out their relationship with legacy men.”

“And we’re letting legacy men have what they want. Isn’t that better for everybody? My mother says legacy men have been selecting women for generations. She says it’s a wonder we aren’t all house pets. Now the women get to do some selecting.”

Wiggle. Stroke. Stretch. Wiggle.

He helped her slip out of her alter when she finished her forty tendays and she immediately went into hibernation. Now it was his turn to spend four hundred days alone.

He wasn’t completely isolated. There were twelve different ways she could be awakened in an emergency, eight of them procedures in which the ship would automatical-ly respond if it detected something wrong and he didn’t give it a countermanding order.

He wouldn’t be totally dependent on machines if something unexpected happened.

They were still looking after each other, even if one of them wasn’t conscious.

He had met people who limited their sex lives to simulations. Some of his elders had even nullified their sex drive, to simplify their lives. They all lost something, in his opinion. He had chosen his sexual simulations with some care, but they could never achieve the unpredictable spontaneity of a real person. And they weren’t real.

You always knew they weren’t real. They were taller or shorter, thinner or fleshier, passive or rambunctious, because you had entered the appropriate parameters in the variations list. Would you like an occasional surprise? Enter a percentage in the random box. You could always cancel and restart if you didn’t like the results.

He had the ship prepare a subdued welcome home party when he brought her out of hibernation. It was a simple greeting, with a simulated harpist, lots of blue and caramel coloring, and a buffet stocked with most of the tidbits she seemed to like.

They had now traveled 489 light-years.

They were supposed to spend one hundred tendays, right at the center of the voyage, with both of them awake and unaltered. Kemen started talking about the ceremony in the middle of the fourth tenday. She brought it up, he noticed, after a sexual interlude in her quarters, while he was eyeing the ship’s latest lunch suggestions.

“I’ve been thinking about the ceremony,” Kemen said. “Is it really something we have to do?”

Benduin Desha had handed him her all-important addition to his funding with two requirements attached. He had to make the trip with someone from another branch and the two of them had to hover over the galaxy, hold hands, and make a statement about the basic unity of mankind.

We are still one species, Benduin Desha had said. Faced with the immensity of the galaxy—seeing it spread out before you—you should see how small we are. That we must stay together.

“We agreed to do it,” Revali said. “She could sue me for everything she gave me. For taking her money and claiming I was going to do something I didn’t do.”

“I’m not going to feel what she wants me to feel. I can tell you that now. We’re becoming two different species. It’s inevitable.”

“I believe we’ve just acquired some evidence we can still mate. Isn’t that the critical test of speciation?”

“I’m talking about a serious issue, Rev.”

“We can edit your feelings. The feelings that count are the things we’ll feel when we look at the galaxy from the outside. That’s the part people will pay to feel. For the ceremony—we can edit your feelings to something neutral, like calm.”

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“And what happens afterward? When people ask me if I really agree with her oration?”

Revali smiled. “You can be evasive. Diplomatic. I did it for years after Ulvan took charge of my fund-raising.”

They had some good times during the Central Awake. Revali had been in love several times, and he knew this wasn’t it. But he did like her. And she liked him. He couldn’t resist the glow on her face when she talked about the research she was going to do when they reached altitude. She had abandoned her historical and literary pursuits and started revising her research program. The triple-barreled telescope stuffed in the cargo bay made maximum use of optical tricks and the best engineering her personal grants could buy. It was the equivalent of an instrument with a twenty-meter mirror stored in a 3x3 box. Every astronomer in the history of mankind had looked at the Universe through the galaxy. She would be the first observer who could look across the galaxy and see things that lay on the other side of the central bulge. She could turn the telescope away from the galaxy and look at the Universe without the obstructions created by the galaxy’s stars and dust clouds.

“I know I’m not going to make any revolutionary discoveries,” Kemen said. “I probably won’t, anyway. But I’ll get information that will refine a lot of numbers. I’ll have data that can keep people busy for years.”

It should get her a good appointment, too. She’d be the most famous astrophysicist in the solar system.

“Even if it doesn’t give me a big career boost,” Kemen said, “I’ll still know I’ve done something. That I made a contribution.”

They were two different personality types. He was an adventurer and experiencer.

She was an explorer and an achiever.

That kind of difference didn’t create tensions. He had been dealing with personality differences all his life. The difference that counted shadowed every moment they spent together. She clung tenaciously to every doctrine her mother had given her. He could have recited every item in her basic credo. Men and women are trapped in a permanent conflict . . . Men dealt with the conflict for millennia by controlling women with their extra strength. . . . Women got some relief when technology reduced the value of pure muscle, but neither sex has ever really wanted real equality. . . . How many legacy women volunteered for this expedition? You’ve been selecting women with the traits you like, whether you know it or not. . . . Independent legacy women join our branch. Legacy men keep joining the male branch. You belong to a dying species.

They argued about the ceremony off and on during the rest of the Central Awake.

The Wake ended and they repeated another cycle of hibernations and altered periods. Kemen started to talk about the ceremony during the period when she was altered and dropped it, like a good concubine, as soon as she saw the look on Revali’s face. She could have lectured him about it during his altered period, but she apparently decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

She had been right, too. His altered personality would have listened politely, engaged in reasoned debate, and generally tried to avoid conflict. He would have returned to his baseline personality knowing she was still trying to avoid doing the ceremony.

Instead, she had stood over him and delivered an ultimatum while he was still adjusting to his return to baseline. She had ambushed him at the best moment she could have chosen, knowing he would feel he couldn’t argue with her while he was still sorting out the changes in his emotions. She had been through the process herself. She knew you felt confused and uneasy, no matter what the numbers on the screen said. And he now had 882 days to convince her she should step back and accept an unacceptable reality.

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November/December 2017

He took his time. He waited six tendays before he made his f irst attempt. He picked a time when she was glowing, and he was genuinely interested in the things she was saying.

“I wonder if you’ve really thought through the situation I’ll be in if we don’t do the ceremony. I’ll be so far in debt if she sues it could take me centuries to get out of it. I might never get out of it if this project doesn’t pay off like I hope it will.”

It took her a moment to realize he’d changed the subject. Her hands froze in the middle of a gesture.

“I meant it when I said I’ve made up my mind,” Kemen said. “I understand the problem. She can sue me. I’m the one responsible.”

“It doesn’t work that way. I signed the contract with her. I’m the one who has to sue you if she sues me.”

“We don’t know what Benduin Desha will do. Or what kind of responses we’ll be able to make. We’re talking about something that’s sixteen years in the future.”

“We’ll be the most famous cheats in the solar system. We’re dealing with someone who’s been accumulating money for two hundred years. A very tough person. She could shut down every career possibility we glanced at.”

“Most of the people in my branch will feel I did the right thing. They’ll understand how I feel.”

“They’ll still know you made an agreement and didn’t keep it. You didn’t have to come on this trip. You could have rejected the conditions and stayed in the solar system.”

“I thought I could go through with the ceremony. I’d never spent this much time with a legacy person. I didn’t understand how big the difference really is.”

There were just two ways you could persuade someone to do something, Revali had decided. You could appeal to their moral sense—to their desire to feel they were good people doing good things—or you could convince them they would be better off if they did what you asked.

He didn’t nag her. The next time they discussed the subject, she brought it up.

That was a good sign. She felt she had to justify herself. He gave her glimpses of his feelings, but he let her do most of the talking. He followed the same strategy the next time she brought it up. This time she let him know she had decided he shouldn’t worry about Benduin Desha. She was confident the members of her branch would help him pay off any financial burdens Dama Desha imposed on him.

Revali controlled the ship. Kemen was essentially a guest. But she had been grant-ed some limited control she could use in special circumstances. He called up the ship’s security system and started checking for weak spots and places where he could make useful changes.

They were 397 days from altitude when he decided she was never going to be persuaded. He waited another tenday and stopped her when she was slipping into another attempt at self-justification.

“You’re on this ship because Benduin Desha said I had to take someone from one of the branches. For the ceremony. You were my third choice.”

She stared at him. It was the first time he had broken into one of her monologues.

“You were my third choice,” Revali repeated. “You wouldn’t be here if she had let me take my first choice.”

“I’m not the person I was f ifteen years ago. I thought the ceremony was just a harmless gesture. Can’t you understand that?”

“You made an agreement, Kemen. If you aren’t willing to keep your side of the bargain, there’s no reason I should honor the other side.”

She stood up. “Are you trying to coerce me?”

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“I will go outside the ship by myself. I’ll record my feelings. I’ll probably do it more than once if it looks like a good idea. And we’ll turn around and head home.”

“You’d throw away the whole scientific value of this expedition just because you’re afraid of that woman?”

“The ship will be taking images all the time we’re at altitude. We both know your role is marginal. There are hundreds of researchers in the solar system who can analyze the data when we get home.”

“And I can guarantee they’ll keep wishing they had all the advantages of a researcher who can modify her research program on the spot, as she sees possibilities.

I’m not going to brainlessly collect data.”

“You were given an opportunity in exchange for your participation in the ceremony. Benduin Desha has the right to know I did my best to see you complied.”

It was a strange form of combat. His adversary was located just a few steps away, in her own quarters. They even met in the commons every now and then.

Neither one of them knew what to do when that happened. Should they glare?

Make a joke about it? They stared at each other, faces frozen, and sidled back to their domains. Revali wondered if she was just as confused as he was, behind that impassive mask. She probably was.

Kemen would outscore him on any test of mental ability he had ever taken. She would have overwhelmed him in a tenday if he hadn’t been working the defensive.

She had to create attacks that would overcome all the defaults that gave him control of the ship. He could retain control if he merely detected her attacks and blocked them.

She might be intelligent and knowledgeable, but she wasn’t noticeably imaginative. She launched most of her attacks at the controls that would unbox her telescope and set it up outside the ship. It was the obvious target, and he had surrounded it with every trap and alarm the ship could suggest. Most of her attacks didn’t get past the probe stage.

She almost caught him by surprise the first time she changed her approach. The ship advised him one of the plumbing routines had jammed, and he started to order a standard reboot. Then he realized he was being stupid. He set up an offline simulator and the simulated reboot triggered a series of events that would have locked him out of half the ship’s life support functions. She wouldn’t have controlled the functions, but she could have held them hostage.

She gave him another surprise when the ship woke him up with a situation that looked like a possible attack. He neutralized it with a standard defense and went back to sleep wondering why she had suddenly done something obvious again. Then the ship woke him up again fifteen minutes later.

None of her attacks demanded any serious effort on his part. They just had to meet one requirement—the ship had to ask him for guidance. She could turn them out by the thousands. One every fifteen minutes.

He took it for two days. Then he blocked her access to every item in the education and entertainment data banks.

He could have blocked her out of the entire system. But that would have been too dangerous. She had to have access in case anything happened to him. Accidents could happen. Bodies could malfunction in odd ways. She was a critical element in his backup system—just as he was a critical element in hers.

“I think we should negotiate,” Kemen said. “This isn’t doing either of us any good.”

She could have knocked on his door. Instead the ship jarred him out of a nap, and they lounged in their quarters exchanging audios.

Afloat Above a Floor of Stars

115

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“The ceremony isn’t negotiable,” Revali said. “No ceremony, no research.”

“I understand that.”

“So what are you offering?”

“I want an extra forty tendays at altitude for my research. And I’m willing to have you skip your alter periods. I’ll still do mine. But you can skip yours.”

“You agreed to forty tendays when you agreed to do the ceremony. Now you want another forty on top of that?”

“Don’t try to stonewall me, Rev. I hate that ceremony. It violates everything I believe. I’m willing to maintain the physical side of our relationship. I’ll do my alter periods. But I’m not going to spout those silly lines if I don’t get something in return.”

“I’ll give you an extra fifteen tendays. Just to get this nonsense settled. What are you going to do with an extra forty? You’re going to come home overloaded with data with the forty you agreed to.”

“Do you want me to do the ceremony or don’t you? We both know you don’t want to come home with no ceremony and no data. Every donor you’ve got will be screaming.”

“You’re the one who broke the agreement, Kemen. You can skip your alter periods.

I’m willing to do without them. You can skip the alter periods and I’ll give you twenty extra tendays. I’ll be surprised if you keep busy for ten.”

He clamped his mouth shut and waited. He had started to offer twenty-five but he was coming to a conclusion. She was bargaining over a moral issue. She had to know she had pushed him to the limit.

“I’ll settle for thirty,” Kemen said. “That’s the lowest I’m willing to go. I’m not going to bargain one minute longer.”

Revali didn’t open the view ports when the ship advised them they were now creeping through the Universe at .01 percent the speed of light—the residual speed the ship had acquired before it activated the arcane devices that propelled them at hyperlight velocities. He was going to experience his first moments outside the ship without preliminary peeks. His sponsors were paying him for that first rush of emotion, whatever it might be.

They helped each other with the suits and the checks. They would be wearing skin-tight suits, with their backs strapped to a framework that contained their life support system and their recording equipment.

Their eyes had required a special effort. The material over their faces would transmit over 99 percent of the optical light that passed through it. Their eyes would be exposed to radiation damage, but the ship had been equipped with a state-of-the-art optical repair module.

A green light on Revali’s glove advised him all his monitors were functioning. The sensors distributed through his body were recording all his responses, from the brain down. The camera on his forehead was recording everything he saw. Eventually it would all be processed into a download that would transmit his feelings to anyone who bought it.

The door opened. The thrusters on the framework pushed him away from the ship.

He had watched interviews with the explorers who had made major first landings in the solar system. People were always asking them how it felt. As if you could put feelings like that into phrases and sentences. He didn’t have to find words. He just had to respond. The sensors and the monitors would transmit all the nuances of the emotions surging through his consciousness.

He was floating above the Orion arm of the galaxy as if he were suspended above a f loor covered with f laming sheets of stars and the mists of gas that surrounded them. At three hundred light-years, he was still skimming the surface of the galaxy.

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He could just make out the darkness that marked the inner edge of the arm—the light-years of emptiness that separated it from the inner arm and the core.

The bulge at the core rose out of the floor like a titanic distant sun. It was twenty-six thousand light-years away, but its white brightness dominated everything.

He had been afraid the training and advertising simulations would dilute his emotional reactions. He had turned off the image of the galaxy and exited into black space when he had practiced the exiting routine on the simulator. Now, staring at that central light, he knew it had been an unnecessary precaution. No simulation could capture the fury of the energies spread in front of him.

The hurricanes that rampaged across Earth had always reminded him of galaxies in pictures taken from orbit. The worst hurricane humans had endured would be an invisible eddy in a storm that had been raging for thirteen billion years.

He wasn’t looking at an image when he looked down. Directly below him, hidden in that mass of light and dust, all the inhabitants of the solar system were going about their business. The light from his native sun wouldn’t reach this point for thirteen hundred years.

He tipped back his head and stared into empty blackness. There were other galaxies out there, billions of them, but they were so far away they couldn’t be seen with an unaided human eye. He couldn’t have seen most of them if he had looked through Kemen’s telescope. They only showed up when you imaged them over time, capturing their light photon by photon so a computer could build up the pictures he had collected since he was a child. He was looking at the loneliest sky any human had ever seen.

“You have now been outside for twenty-five minutes,” the ship said. “Kemenangan See is about to exit.”

The announcement jerked him out of his obsessive concentration on the vision that had fascinated him for half his life. Twenty-five minutes?

His thrusters turned him so he could monitor Kemen’s exit. He heard her gasp when she looked down. He watched her face as she turned and maneuvered. She stared across the light-years at the core. She tipped her framework forward and hung face down above the brightness. She tipped it backward and stared at the emptiness above them. She turned away from the core, and he listened to her breathe as she reacted to the expanse that stretched between them and the outer edge.

She looked at him and shook her head. He touched his lips with his finger and she nodded.

Benduin Desha was wrong. He had known Benduin Desha was wrong the moment he looked down at the inferno of mass and energy sprawling below him. They had been f ighting over nothing. It didn’t matter what they thought. Humanity could shatter into a thousand species. It didn’t matter. They could separate. They could unite. They could compete and form alliances. It didn’t matter. They would still be billions of f lickering bits of consciousness creeping through a blaze that dwarfed them into microorganisms.

He couldn’t say that. He couldn’t edit this part of his record. He shouldn’t even be thinking it. His audience was going to feel a puzzling interval of blurry confused conf lict. He just had to watch the emotions shaping Kemen’s face. And hope he was reading her correctly.

Kemen maneuvered into a position beside him. He held out his hand and waited while she studied it.

She gripped his fingers, and he felt a faint reassuring squeeze through his gloves.

They turned toward the central sphere, as Benduin Desha’s script directed. “We are still one species, faced with the immensity of the galaxy—seeing it spread out before us . . .”

Later, inside the ship, with the recorders turned off, they both burst out laughing. ❍

Afloat Above a Floor of Stars

117

LOVE AND

DEATH AND THE

STAR THAT

SHALL NOT BE

NAMED:

KOM’S STORY

James Gunn

James Gunn tells us, “I remain reasonably healthy for my years, but more limited in the challenges that I accept, getting up each day to renew my connections with the outside world and to add a little bit each day to the creative urges that have defined my life.” Jim, who turned ninety-four in July, has recently been engaged in a flurry of creative activity. The tale that you are about to read is another story about a character first encountered in his Transcendental trilogy. The third volume, Transformation, was released by Tor Books in June. Jim’s memoir, Star-Begotten: A Life Lived In Science Fiction came out from McFarland and Company in the fall, and McFarland may also publish his 1951 master’s thesis on Modern Science

Fiction with new commentary. It may be the only thesis ever published in a science fiction magazine. Four parts of it were published in Dynamic Science Fiction before it was cut short when the magazine folded.

Kom encountered two surprises that changed his life forever when his two-person scout craft arrived in the system of the star that shall not be named. The second took a long cycle to reach him, but the first was apparent immediately. The star that shall not be named was an ordinary white dwarf sun with a system of cindered worlds, and not the mysterious father sun stripped of his progeny by an envious goddess.

The mythologists were wrong; the cosmologists were right: the white dwarf was the 118
remnant of a star that had expanded into a red giant, stripping the gases from any gas giants it had birthed and the seas and atmospheres from any rocky worlds before it collapsed into its present depleted state. Kom would not be reunited with his dear, dead father. The star that shall not be named was not the paradise of departed Sirians. His father was not there, nor was any other spirit. The desolation before him was matched by the desolation within.

What was there, as he discovered when his despair eventually lifted, was a lonely beacon, like the flickering sign of intelligent life in a lonely universe. He traced it to a location near the star that shall not be named. It came from no planet, no satellite, no ship, nothing within the discrimination of his sensors that could send a signal.

Could it be his father’s spirit?

The passage from the outer reaches to near-solar space took most of a long cycle during which he saw much closer the devastation caused by the expansion phase of the star that shall not be named. Finally he came upon the source of the signal: it was not his father but a battered escape capsule of an unfamiliar design turning slowly in the wan radiance of the star that shall not be named, getting just enough energy from its rays to sustain its limited operation.

Kom connected the capsule to his ship. Beside the capsule’s hatch were marks incised in a cryptic series of lines—perhaps instructions for access that he could not decipher—but he finally found a button that set off explosive bolts. He sampled the atmosphere, which was within tolerable limits and without apparent toxins. Inside the capsule was a still-functioning freeze chamber, and inside the chamber was the ugliest creature he had ever seen—a creature with four weak extremities emerging at awkward angles from a shrunken and fragile central torso and topped by a strange growth dotted with openings and covered in places with threadlike tendrils.

That was the second surprise. He had found not his father but another creature, dead like his father—or so nearly dead that the difference was imperceptible. If any other Galactic had discovered this castaway, he thought, the end would have been certain, but Sirians have such fine control of their temperatures that freezing is not necessarily fatal. Sirians had been discovered in hidden glaciers and been revived after being frozen for many hundreds, even thousands, of long cycles. Whatever revival techniques the world possessed that had produced this monstrosity, the Sirian process was certain to be better.

He opened the chamber and set about reviving its occupant, elevating its temperature fraction by fraction, easing the transition from cell to cell, from external to internal, over a period of almost a long cycle, with the patience that Sirians have acquired over their catastrophic past. Finally the occupant made a sound like a gasp of breath and shortly thereafter opened what Kom later learned were its viewing organs, and then an opening a bit below that emitted sounds.

Later, when they had learned to communicate through long practice and the help of Kom’s pedia, Kom deciphered the language of their first waking encounter: “What in the hell are you!”

They were an odd pair whose only shared feeling was disgust, but they got on, and within a half long cycle, they were able to converse with the aid of Kom’s pedia, which could make the sounds that Kom could not and hear the sounds that were too muted for Kom’s hearing organs. The ugly, fragile creature, Kom learned, was a human, member of a species that had just discovered extrasolar space travel, and it was male. His designation was “Sam,” and he had been a crew member on an expedition to decipher a nexus chart that had been bought from Galactic traders or sold by traitors or stolen by Federation captives—although he did not know anything about the Federation—and all had gone well until f laws in the coordinates destroyed the ship and all his shipmates in the chaos of unspace, and expelled his escape module into the system of the star that shall not be named. That Kom Love and Death and the Star that Shall Not Be Named: Kom’s Story 119

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should have discovered the module was a chance beyond calculation, depending as it did upon his fleeing Romi and the sacrifice his love was calling him to make. And that he should set his course for the star that shall not be named.

“And what were you doing out here, so far from a world you could call home?” Sam said. “In a system that has been almost consumed by its sun. What do you call it?”

“It is the star that shall not be named,” Kom said. “My sun is a hot, blue-white monster of a star, and it has planets to match, big gas giants.”

“We call it ‘Sirius,’ ” Sam said.

“We call it ‘Ran,’ and its only livable worlds are the satellites of the gas giants, particularly the gas giant we call ‘Kilran’ and its satellite that we call ‘Komran.’ ”

He had been born on Komran, Kom said. Komran was the second largest satellite of the fourth gas giant from the sun. It baked in Ran’s glare half a cycle and froze in Kilran’s shadow for the other half, while Komran rotated half a turn to bring each of its hemispheres alternately into light and darkness.

“Komran is enslaved to Kilran but tyrannized by Ran,” Kom said. “Ranians evolved adjusting to continual change and cyclic extremes of temperature, as well as the incessant movement of the world’s crust caused by Kilran’s constant pull.”

“That sounds like our concept of a place of eternal torment after death,” Sam said.

“Ranians have no such brutal myths,” Kom said. “Our afterlives are peaceful happy times, like a return to our fathers’ nurturing pouch, where the temperature is constant and food is plentiful.”

“We have that, too,” Sam said. “That’s for the people who do good or believe in the right things. I guess if you have a living hell you don’t need one after death.”

They had been born under different suns and grew to maturity on different worlds with different conditions and had been shaped by them, not only physically but also psychologically.

Komranians had evolved from primitive life forms trapped under falls of rock and tossed by surging seas, Kom said, and the creatures that finally emerged were hardy and temperature-sensitive. They thrived for half a day in the warmth and shut down for half a day in the cold until, finally, they developed more efficient mechanisms for controlling internal temperature in the form of their present beautiful radiating fins.

“So that is why you look like a barrel,” Sam said. “And those flaps on your sides are how you regulate your temperature.”

“It is this triumph of matter over energy,” Kom said, “that makes Komranians fierce competitors and even fiercer friends, and it is their unique planetary situation that makes Komranians special in the Galaxy. And it is your benign conditions that make your people so fragile and prey to a thousand ills.”

“Well, now,” Sam said. “You may be right, but we humans have had to compete with dozens of other creatures who are bigger, stronger, faster, and more deadly than we are, and we have survived them all because we are smarter and more determined.”

And so it went, friendly enough but also deeply competitive, and it might have been more competitive if Sam had been stronger. But the effects of his freezing lingered, and he spent most of his time lying on a makeshift pallet and trying to keep down the dried Sirian rations the scout ship provided while it made its slow way out of the system and back toward the nexus point from which it had emerged long cycles before.

Sam kept returning to Kom’s miraculous discovery of the escape pod in a forbidden place where no Sirian had ever been, that was so sacred it could not be named.

“It emerges from the mystery of place and origins,” Kom said.

“As it does for all life,” Sam said.

For Ranians it was more extreme, Kom said. Not only was the origin and development of life on Komran handicapped by temperature extremes, Ranians were born 120

James Gunn

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live but immature, like larvae. Their mothers gestated them, but they developed to maturity inside their fathers’ bodies. The maturing process, consuming special food stored for their nurturing during the mother’s gestation, was idyllic and remembered by adults as the happy time when food was always available and temperature was constant. It was this time that Ranians longed to regain, that controlled their lives and shaped their dreams.

For reasons that were beyond rational analysis, Ranians associated that dream with Ran’s distant companion star. That white-dwarf sun was always assumed, never named. Although Ran gave Ranians life, the star that shall not be named gave them hope. To live in the feeble glow of its blessed rays was every Ranian’s consuming passion. But, according to myth and common belief, the companion star had no planets. Creation myths told Ranians that their companion sun was the source of their existence, that it once was even larger than Ran, but was diminished by the nurturing of a group of worlds that were stolen away by his mate and given as satellites to the gas giants. In sorrow and dismay at the inevitable end of love, the companion sun at first became angry and red with rage, but weakened by the nurturing process and by the betrayal of its mate, it collapsed into its present shrunken state, its former robust emanations diminished to a feeble glow.

Some astronomers supported these myths with speculation that the satellites of the gas giants such as Kilran were indeed the offspring of the sun that shall not be named. Others, less mystical, believed that they were once independent worlds of Ran captured by the gas giants, or worlds drawn into the system from the great disk of planetary matter beyond the farthest giant.

Astronomers told Ranians that beliefs about the dwarf companion who shall not be named were ancestral memories of the Ranian system, that the companion went through a normal cycle of expansion and collapse, that its planets, if it had any, were consumed in its expansion stage, or expelled into the great darkness. But Ranians had nightmares of being stolen from heaven, never to return, by a powerful blue-white goddess.

Ranians imagined that if they were more powerful, if they could only perfect themselves, they could build a new world around the companion and protect it from the tyranny of their hot blue-white sun, or liberate Komran itself from the grasp of Ran as well as Kilran, and rejoin their father. There, on this paradisiacal dream world, they would shed their fins and live as beings that chose their own fates rather than having them chosen by their solar goddess.

It was a long, impassioned speech, made even more complicated by the difficulties in translation from an alien language into human, often without precise equivalents.

Sam looked up at Kom as if he could discern some display of emotion in the alien’s barrel shape or blocky extremities. But Kom was as solid as the shape he resembled.

“I would not have guessed your people were so spiritual,” Sam said.

All that is mythology, of course, Kom said. Ranians know this, but they are dominated by it anyway. These facts control who Ranians are and why they think and behave the way they do.

After Ranians had eaten their way out of the father’s body, changed, fully developed, but still small, often the father died, having not stored sufficient food for the brood or having a larger brood than customary, or not being strong enough to sustain his own vitality while nurturing the brood. Families were carefully planned in these days of scientific understanding, and Sirian females chose sturdy mates with good nurturing instincts. Now only one father out of ten died, and the death of the father was considered the fault of the female, a crime that was often punished, sometimes up to and including execution. But some fates were worse than death.

Becoming a father, however it turns out, Kom continued, was a life-changing Love and Death and the Star that Shall Not Be Named: Kom’s Story 121

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experience entered into only by the brave and the strong or the foolhardy. Even if a father survived, he often was damaged by the experience so that he lived a life short-ened by debility and an uncertain ability to control internal temperature, which itself could be fatal. No male was a father more than once, and used-up males littered the nursing homes and retirement villas. Some philosophers advocated voluntary suicide or euthanasia to clear the scene for greater Sirian accomplishment.

“That’s pretty grim,” Sam said.

“We accepted it as the way things are and have always been,” Kom said. “Until we encountered other Galactics and learned that every creature was not created in the same cursed way—and suffered the same psychological damage.”

He did not remember when he ate his way through the belly of his father, Kom said, after the food his father had stored was consumed by his greedy offspring. But his father told him stories about it, and he saw it happen to others. He dreamed about it often. His father was a great male. After Kom separated himself from his siblings, his father told Kom about treating his nurturing pouch with antibiotics and then sewing up the holes Kom and his unthinking siblings had chewed. Out of all the others, Kom’s father picked Kom as the repository of his wisdom, and Kom and his father spent many happy hours together as his father prepared Kom to assume the position and power that would have been his father’s if he had not chosen to make the ultimate sacrifice for love.

“Love?” Sam said.

“You cannot know the kind of joy mixed with apprehension that floods the male Ranian body when a beautiful Ranian female chooses a male as the father of her children,” Kom said.

“I have a prospective mate waiting for me back on Earth,” Sam said.

“I hope she is kind and gentle,” Kom said. “I wish I could say the same for my mother, who ate my father when I was still young and our little piece of Komran was torn apart by quakes.

“ ‘Do not worry,’ my father told me. ‘Komran will provide, and the hungry times will pass. Your mother does what she must to keep herself and her children alive, and she will see that you gain the advancement you deserve.’ But she never did.”

He did not eat from his father’s corpse, Kom continued, having already consumed too much of his father’s substance in his unthinking larval state.

But his father was right. The hungry times passed, and his family grew sound again feasting on his father’s memory as his offspring had feasted on his body, and the wise counsel that his father had passed along to his son. Kom became the wise male who served as the head of the family, and part of his wisdom was to reflect on the fact that his father did not grow old and feeble like so many males of his generation, sacrifices on the altar of love.

He left home as soon as he could, Kom said, escaping his mother’s ravenous regard and refusal to shield her children from her heat, and gave himself over to the state, whose concerns, and even punishments, were blessedly impersonal. Because of his father’s once-promising career and the wisdom that he had communicated, Kom was appointed to the academy for pre-spacers, where he was educated in the mathematics and the physics of space, astronomy and cosmology, history and practices of spaceflight, Galactic culture, and the preeminence of Sirians.

“That must make you popular among your fellow Galactics,” Sam said.

“We teach greatness so that our offspring can rise above the treachery of their biology,” Kom said.

He studied hard, Kom said, though with the skepticism that emerges from every thoughtful Ranian’s consciousness of place. They know that the Universe is 122

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unrelenting and unstable, and so they seek the truth that is unspoken, the reality behind the deception of appearance. And Kom studied to make his dead father proud and his father’s sacrif ice meaningful. He was passed on to the space college as the most promising academy student of his class.

College was far more demanding, Kom continued, requiring not only the discipline of the mind but also the discipline of the body that lies at the heart of the Ranian experience. Ranians must perform not only the exercises that enable them to achieve and to endure but also the rigorous protocols they must learn to control their inner states. Komran provides its offspring with such physical extremes of temperature and Komranology that Ranians must divorce their inner states from their outer existence. Their happiness was dependent not upon events but upon determination.

Ranians willed their happiness just as they willed their internal temperatures.

In the third long cycle of college, Ranians were introduced to space, first on a ship manned by experienced crews and then on ships operated by senior cadets. On his first trip Kom discovered his natural habitat. While his fellow students were panicking, floundering in weightlessness, puking in corners, and, hot with shame, swinging a cloth in an attempt to blot the evidence, Kom felt as if he had come home, as if he resided once more in his father’s belly. It was for this, he knew, that his father had nourished him and shared not only his body but also his wisdom. Kom was a natural spacer.

Among brighter students now, Kom was not as successful as he had been before.

His classwork had grown more diff icult and his academic efforts frantic. Even calmed by the remembered voice of his father, Kom could not excel as he had been able to do before. But his spacefaring skills made up for everything. Where other students had to think before they acted, every decision came to Kom as if a product of body, not mind. He rose to a position of eminence, to captain of cadets, on skill—and the attitude of leadership that accompanied it.

By the time his class had reached its final year, Kom had already been assured of the f irst place to open up on the premier ship of the Ranian f leet. In response his performance in intellectual pursuits improved, and once more he began to succeed, sometimes more than his peers, in Ranian history, in political science, and preemi-nently in space navigation, engineering, gunnery, and command.

Then he met Romi. She was a first-year student from Komran’s other hemisphere.

In the ordinary course of life they never would have met. Not only distance but status separated them. Kom was a commoner, who had survived the hungry times only by reason of his mother’s moral turpitude. But here, in the space college, he was the superior, and as captain of cadets able to give orders to first-year students and expect them to be obeyed instantly. Even unreasonable orders—in fact, as tradition and common sense dictated, the more unreasonable the better, for crews had to obey without thinking, without considering whether an order was reasonable.

But he could not command Romi. She was the most beautiful Ranian Kom had ever met, and she was in love with him. He felt stirrings within him, thoughts of storing food within his belly, thoughts of nurturing larval children. And then he remembered his father.

“I should think so,” Sam said. “Not that something like this would happen between humans.”

“I understand that love takes many forms across the Galaxy,” Kom said. “That some is powerful and enduring while some is fleeting and casual. I do not know what love is like for a Ranian female—I think it involves the predatory—but for a Ranian male, love is a great passion that prepares him for what may be the ultimate sacrifice.”

He endured the situation for the rest of the academic cycle, Kom said, trying to limit his contacts with Romi, but every time she was near he felt the primal urges Love and Death and the Star that Shall Not Be Named: Kom’s Story 123

November/December 2017
that his father had felt, the urges that had betrayed him. He even went out of his way to make sure their paths did not cross.

“But I met her in my dreams,” he said.

“I understand that some Galactics do not dream; some do not even sleep. The dream life of Sirians, however, is as real as—no, more real than—the waking life. We discuss our dreams as if we lived them. We analyze them. We write them down. We manage them so that they end satisfactorily, giving us strength or wisdom, or reinforcing our self-image.

“But I could not manage my dreams of Romi. They always ended with small Ranians eating their way through my belly while I stared down, helpless to control them or my temperature, leaving me injured and weak, doomed to a lifetime as an invalid.

And I told no one.”

Finally his ordeal ended. His class completed its course work, and they were assigned to ships. Somehow he had managed to retain his status during his inner turmoil, and he joined the Kilsat as junior pilot-in-training. He left Romi behind as a second-cycle cadet and put her out of his mind.

He was happy. Space was his environment; Romi no longer haunted his thoughts or disturbed his dreams. He was a natural pilot, responding intuitively to subcon-scious cues, as if his dear father were guiding his actions from his place of honor near the star that shall not be named. He made friends with his fellow spacers and filled his off-duty moments with good male fellowship. They bonded as Ranian crewmem-bers do in the unifying environment of space. They talked of challenges and accomplishments, of ambitions and achievement, and never of family or sacrifice.

The Kilsat made its first jump during his maiden voyage. That took the cadets beyond the narrow confines of the Ranian system. The experience shook many of his crewmates, but Kom found it exhilarating—not only space but the realization that the hidden universes within space were his real home. During the second jump he was at the controls and gloried in the power of transcending time and space. All the Universe was his, he felt, and he dedicated his joy to his father’s memory.

By the time they made their third jump they were in Galactic space, surveying the magnificence of the Galactic Center. The Galactic Center was not the center of the Galaxy but the center of the Federation, where the representatives of the great peoples met and the Galaxy was governed. Galactic Center, Kom said, was an insignificant system of rocky planets orbiting an insignificant sun. No one would think of it as a place of greatness, as a place of any importance at all. And that, no doubt, is why it was chosen, along with the fact that it was uninhabited, at least by any member species. And although representatives to the Galactic Council and innumerable bureaucrats inhabited those planets, some for their entire lives, the destruction of the Galactic Center would mean little except to those personally involved.

“To look at that impoverished system and realize its importance,” Kom said,

“makes even the most robust Ranian realize the value of inner strength and the pitfalls of appearance. We had learned that principle from the shiftings of Komran beneath our extremities, but here it was brought home to us again.”

They looked, they admired from afar, and they departed, learning nothing of the workings inside the capital of the Galaxy beyond what they had learned in the academy. But it was enough for simple spacers, and they pondered its meaning as they returned to Ran and their lives there, now a crew in the true meaning of the word, functioning as the brain and central nervous system of the ship, working as a single entity. For the first time in his life Kom felt as he had when he was part of his father, at peace with his world, content in his way of life. The Kilsat had become his father, or, perhaps more accurately, now the Kilsat and his father were one.

“But when we returned to Sirius, Romi came back into my life,” Kom said. “It was time for the cadet cruises, and, by the evil goddess, she was assigned to the Kilsat.

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When I saw her, I knew my time of greatest temptation had arrived. Without a word to anyone, I went to the nearest two-person scout craft, crawled through the tunnel that linked it to the ship, detached it from its mooring bolts, turned off the communications gear, and drifted away before I started the propulsion system.

“I knew where I was going. I was headed for the nexus point that everyone knows and nobody dares use, the jump that ends in orbit around the white dwarf whose name shall not be spoken.”

In his turn Sam told Kom many things about Earth and about humans and their history and literature and art. They had nothing to do during the long journey back to the nexus point but communicate, and Sam loved to talk. He was, he said, making up for his long, silent, frozen cycles. He never realized that his stories about Earth horrified Kom: the struggles, the competition, the battles, the wars. Even in literature and art these bloody activities were celebrated. Kom realized that he had to get this information to his leaders, and Sam—unaware that he had revealed humanity’s blood thirst and its inability to live in a civilized fashion with others—wanted to get back to his people with the information gathered about the Federation’s precious navigation maps.

Of course he had no chance to get back. Kom did not tell Sam that when they left the sun that shall not be named they would return to Ran and Komran where he would be interrogated at far greater length and in far less pleasant conditions than on Kom’s vessel, cramped though it was. Kom could not let him return with his information, and Kom had to return with his. And then, when they entered the nexus point for the jump that would take them to the nexus point that served the Ran system, Kom felt Sam convulse, and when they emerged, Sam was dead, whether from his weakened condition, the accumulated reactions to Ranian rations, or the shock of entering unspace again. But the last words Sam spoke remained in Kom’s memory: “You are an ugly son-of-a-bitch, Kom, but you’ve been a good friend way out here next to nowhere. It’s been great knowing you.”

Kom felt much the same as when his mother ate his father.

When he got back to Sirian space, he discovered that his information had arrived too late. He had been gone for a dozen long cycles, and the war had not only begun, it was over. But rumors of the Transcendental Machine were spreading fast. Komran’s leaders were concerned. Because he had spent so many long cycles with an alien, and most of all with a human, he was ordered to join the pilgrimage that would begin half a long cycle away on a lonely planet named Terminal.

Kom agreed. He had no choice. His experience with the sun that shall not be named had changed him forever and changed the way his fellow Ranians considered him. He was no longer a simple Ranian, bound to myths and biological imperatives. He had experienced both the reality and the unreality of others. But his desertion and, even more, the heresy of his journey to the star that shall not be named had made him an outcast among Ranians. He accepted that and the fact that sending him on a fool’s errand was a better fate all around than execution. And, more important, Romi had chosen another, who already had nurtured her larvae to maturity and suffered the consequences.

As he prepared to depart on a quest for transcendence, Kom wondered why he had confided so much of his life story to Sam. And gradually he began to see that when he reached the sun that shall not be named, he had lost his father’s spirit and found a replacement. Sam and Kom’s father had begun to merge in Kom’s mind, and that was why the loss of Sam had affected him so much.

And Sam had told him, during their long conversations, about the human family and its process of procreation. What if Ranians could procreate as partners, like humans? Could they transcend their biology?

Could the Transcendental Machine be the answer to his life’s question? ❍

Love and Death and the Star that Shall Not Be Named: Kom’s Story 125

NINE

LATTICES

OF SARGASSO

Jason Sanford

A two-time Nebula Award finalist, Jason Sanford has published dozens of tales in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog,

Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex Magazine, and

InterGalactic Medicine Show, along with reprints in multiple year’s best anthologies. About his latest story Jason says,

“Despite the words of John Donne, each human is indeed an island. We’re swept by the currents of culture and the storms of language, but in the end there we are, isolated islands desperate to communicate our lives and dreams to the other islands we can see, but are never fully touching. Yet, perhaps, just perhaps, this isolation within our own bodies and minds won’t last much longer.”

Lattice 1

Here I am, running the Sargasso Sea. Leaping waist-high waves. Sliding the wet weave into the waves’ troughs. Watching the waters below for the monster hunting me down.

I freeze when the monster’s gened tentacles ripple the blue under my feet, my body bobbing up and down with the clear, floating weave. The monster swims below me, its shark mouth all teeth and rip while dull eyes scan for movement and rear tentacles pulse the water. I hold my breath as the gened creature tastes the current for my scent and fear and life.

The lattice on my head hums and sings, preparing to spin this into memory.

Unable to find me, the monster’s tentacles whirl in angry reds and purples before it shoots onward, seeking elsewhere for my death.

I breathe again and continue running for the safety of Lifeboat Merkosa.

I tap the snowflake-like lattice atop my head and pause the recording.

Forgive me, my maybe-one-day love, for this lattice’s rambles and disjunction. If I live long enough, I’ll dive the lattice and edit my memories into a coherent narrative.

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Asimov’s

I’ll even remove the fear tinting this experience like some sick pervo’s dream. But if you’re to receive these memories, my fear and disjunction must be embraced.

I wish you were here to hold me. I’ve cherished every memory you’ve crafted for me. Dreams of us holding hands as we walk the beach sands along the Indian Ocean or while the Moon climbs over the Serengeti. But I now understand what Baba always said. How lattice relationships can’t replace a friend who physically stands beside you in times of trouble.

I should have visited you when I had the chance. Or invited you to Lady Faye’s Island. So many regrets.

But for now, see the island through my eyes. See the mackerel scream of gray clouds blowing the sky, the advance guard of the approaching tropical storm. Watch the waves churn our island’s floating weave of nanotubes and plastic. You’ve always asked about this. You, in your dirt-solid unmoving land, wondering why a Waswahili girl born in America wound up living at sea instead of returning to mother Africa.

Wondering how I tolerate never walking true land.

But for me, Lady Faye’s Island is land. I love my ground to bob and ripple. While others step gingerly across our massive floating island, I see myself as a goddess walking the water. I look through the clear weave at the eels and seaweed below and dream I’m Lady Faye herself, cleansing the oceans of human sin with her unbelievable island.

At least, I dreamed that until I learned what Lady Faye truly is. That’s why I’m sharing these latticed memories with you. Someone else must know the truth.

As I jump another wave I see the Lifeboat Merkosa relay station a few dozen meters away. Mareena stands on top of the orange submarine-like lifeboat, hanging onto the f ilaments binding the lifeboat to the island’s weave. Mareena aims her dark, eyeless face at me, her right hand pointing frantically at one of the blowholes allowing the sea to surge through the island’s weave. She’s warning me. But is it the monster or something else?

A rogue wave several times taller than me rolls the island. I drop flat, my fingers gripping the middle weave’s tiny holes as the wave lifts me up. I feel myself slipping, as if on a water slide like that memory you sent of your vacation last year. But a moment later the wave passes on. The weave stretches and twangs like an out-of-tune guitar, but doesn’t break.

I run on, circling away from the blowhole so a wave doesn’t knock me into the ocean. I’m a few meters from Lifeboat Merkosa when Mareena screams, a massive burst of sound from her gened sonar. A giant’s mouth explodes beneath my feet. The weave rises, throwing me across the slick nanotubes and plastic.

I fight to stand but collapse as my right ankle screams pain. The monster swims at me again. It rams the weave below me, knocking me two meters into the air. The monster’s teeth slip through the weave’s holes and cut my arms and legs as I slide away from its mouth, but the coated nanotubes hold so the monster can’t bite me.

I can no longer stand. My ankle dangles to weird angles, broken. I drag myself across the weave. The monster swims below, debating whether to continue battering me to death. The gened creature looks like a cross between a giant shark and a squid, with long tentacles where a tail would be. Each tentacle flashes red purple red purple in a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of anger.

The monster’s large, blank eyes remind me of Lady Faye’s total ambivalence to whether Mareena and I live or die.

The monster slams into the weave again, bumping me dangerously close to the weave’s blowhole. If I fall into the water, the monster will tear me to shreds.

Just when I think there’s nothing more before I die, the click of sonar washes over my body as Mareena runs across the weave in tiny splashes of water. “Get back to Nine Lattices of Sargasso

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the lifeboat,” I try to shout but my words are whisper weak from the monster knocking the wind out of me.

Mareena shouts my name “Amali, Amali” over and over. The sonic waves from her eyeless face ripple my body in a sound-loving hug.

My friend dives into the blowhole.

I expect the monster to kill Mareena. Instead, through the clear weave, I see the monster hover beside her for a moment before swimming away.

Mareena jumps out of the blowhole and rushes to me, walking the wave-tossing weave with a natural understanding of the ocean’s movement. I ask what she told the monster. How she, a tiny gened slip of a girl, made a creature like that flee.

“That was Hokum,” she says. “He’s an old friend.”

I’m not sure I wanted such an answer.

My memories f low again, the lattice’s shawl resting on my head as it scans my mind. I thought I lost the lattice when the monster attacked, but after Mareena drags me to the lifeboat she slaps the silken cap back on my head and points to the lifeboat’s transmission console.

The transmitter blinks green, indicating it’s still working. I can upload my previously recorded memories along with anything else I care to remember.

My ankle is broken, blood stains my skin from a hundred scrapes and abrasions. I can barely see through the pain. Even though I don’t want to think about her, Lady Faye appears in my mind, her tall pale-skinned body overly confident as always.

Lady Faye is capable of such good. I always wanted to be like her. To overcome any obstacle on the way to my dreams.

Now I’m the obstacle she’s striving to overcome.

No. I must focus. I must create these lattices for you. Upload my memories so you, at least, taste the truth.

Here’s what you need to know: Only a month before, I walked this same middle weave of Lady Faye’s Island.

That’s where I found Mareena. See it with me.

Lattice 2

Red skies at sunrise, a month before. The weave ripples like fire-red coral, reflecting the crimson skies as I track a malfunctioning spider. My eleven-year-old brother, Jecha, runs alongside, searching for salvageable toys and knickknacks in the piles of recovered plastics and trash and crash-related debris.

“Amali, why is it ‘red sky in morning, sailors take warning’?” he asks.

I smile, having forgotten that ancient English rhyme. “Doesn’t mean anything,” I say. “Simply a way to know the weather before decent forecasts.”

Jecha stares at the sky, his always-searching eyes seeking the next exciting thing.

“I still think it’s right. A storm will blow in soon.”

Perhaps, I think. This year’s storm season has come earlier than normal. Already two named storms have churned by south of us in the Sargasso Sea, with others forecast. Even though the countless remotely controlled sails dotting Lady Faye’s Island are slowly moving us north, that’s no guarantee a tropical storm won’t come our way.

Jecha and I stand seven kilometers from the center of Lady Faye’s Island and five hundred meters from where the slick wetness of the island’s middle weave of plastic and coated nanotubes turns into the rough outer weave, which bobs and dips through the ocean waters, cleansing them of the trash and debris and the plastic slush deposited in the oceans by the crash.

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Jason Sanford

Asimov’s

“I barely recall a time without Asimov’s Science Fiction. I was introduced to science fiction by my grandfather, who was a lifelong SF fan with a large collection of Golden Age magazines and books. He also subscribed to Asimov’s in the early 1980s. I vividly remember reading my grandfather’s copies of Asimov’s and being deeply touched by now-classic stories like ‘Speech Sounds’ by Octavia E. Butler and ‘The Peacemaker’ by Gardner Dozois, along with sadly forgotten tales like

‘The Nanny’ by Thomas Wylde.

“When my grandfather died in 1985, I drifted away from the magazine because it was difficult to find in rural Alabama, only to rediscover Asimov’s in college because the student bookstore was inspired enough to stock it. I fell in love again with the magazine this time under Gardner’s editorial eye. Works like ‘Jack’ by Connie Willis and ‘Griffin’s Egg’ by Michael Swanwick inspired me to write my own stories. I even submitted one to Gardner. He sent a polite rejection, which recalling the horrible story I’d written is far more than I deserved. I also enjoyed reading Isaac’s editorials and the letter pages, both of which showed me the larger world of fandom. The realization that so many people saw a similar universe as I did excited me more than anything.

“After college I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand and Asimov’s followed, sent to me in scattered packages from friends or purchased many months after publication in the country’s few English-language bookstores. One afternoon I was stuck at Peace Corps headquarters, located in the heart of Bangkok next to the Chao Phraya River, for a series of rabies shots after being attacked by a stray dog. I sat reading a book when a fellow volunteer placed Asimov’s eighteenth-anniversary issue on the Peace Corps lending library shelves. I snatched up the magazine as the volunteer recommended reading ‘Mortimer Gray’s “History of Death” ’ by Brian Stableford. On the bus back to my site, I read the novella and was blown away. These were the days between the start of the internet and cell phones, but before their widespread use, so when I decided to tell the other volunteer how much I loved the story I telegrammed him. The next day his own telegram arrived at my site containing three words: ‘SCIENCE FICTION ROCKS.’

One of my Thai coworkers asked me what was wrong, since telegrams were usually only sent for serious matters. When she found out I loved science fiction she told me about Kukrit Pramoj, a former Prime Minister of Thailand who was also a science fiction author. Other colleagues joined in, and for the rest of the day we talked about science fiction in a mix of Thai and English.

“I still read Asimov’s and I’ve now published six stories in the magazine (with many thanks to the wonderful Sheila Williams for that). I still have some of my grandfather’s issues with his mailing label on the covers. I showed them the other day to my kids and said, ‘These magazines belonged to your great-grandfather and I read them when I was a kid. Now I’m publishing my own stories in Asimov’s.’

My kids thought that was the coolest thing. Which it totally is. But not as cool as Asimov’s celebrating its fortieth anniversary.”

—Jason Sanford

Even with the sky’s red warning, I can’t imagine a better way to spend a day than wandering the walk-on-water perfection of the middle weave.

We pass a small pile of recovered plastics as Jecha glances at the trash. Two bleached-white plastic ducks lay there along with the usual mix of plastic bottles, bags, crash-era nanotech, shapeless polymer and assorted debris. “There’s nothing good today,” he groans. “We should check for the spider further out.”

I mutter a Kiswahili curse in irritation. The only reason Jecha follows me on my Nine Lattices of Sargasso

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November/December 2017
work rounds is to search for drift toys washed up on the island. Using wave action and an army of solar-powered spiders, Lady Faye’s Island dips and strains the unbelievable amounts of debris that the Atlantic ocean currents deposit in the Sargasso Sea. Our island is a thin net that, over the decades, will return the Sargasso to its original pristine state.

But Jecha is too young to care about this. All he wants is f irst dibs on any good stuff. If he waits for the spiders to carry the trash to the processing plant, he’ll have to compete with twenty other kids searching for toys.

I glance at the white-capped waves pounding the outer weave. Even at this distance I see the silvery spider robots, each with eight legs the size of my arms. The spiders skitter across the loose outer mesh tentacles, removing debris and freeing the odd trapped eel or fish. People can’t go onto the outer weave without special equipment—
doing so risks getting tangled up and drowned by the wave action.

“We’re not going any closer to the outer weave,” I say. “If the spider’s there, it’ll have to stay.”

Jecha kicks the plastics at our feet. Small spiders the size of our hands run over and pile the plastics back up.

Ignoring my brother’s temper tantrum, I raise my scanner above my head. After two hours of tracking the malfunctioning spider’s beacon, I have a good reading on its location. Near Lifeboat Merkosa.

I walk toward it, staring wistfully at the enclosed orange lifeboat. I remember slowly dying in the damn thing. How Mama grew so weak she stopped talking and could only stare at me. How hope never left her eyes.

Lost in memories, I don’t see the backpack lying on the weave. I trip over it and slide down a small wave, drenching myself as Jecha laughs.

Once I stand I lift the backpack, which is soaked but otherwise brand new. A cute manga kitten stitched into its back stares at me with wide eyes. The kitten’s reactive fabric shimmers and changes from red to violet to blue in the sunlight.

“May I have it, Amali?” Jecha whines. “Please.”

“Someone left this out here. It’s not faded enough to have washed up.”

But that can’t be true. Barely two hundred people live and work on Lady Faye’s Island, with only a few having kids who’d own something like this. Such an expensive backpack would have been noticed on our floating paradise.

I open the backpack and pull out a doll with dark brown skin and dark hair. The doll looks new except for the eyes, which are gone, that part of the face worn blank as if by years in the ocean. Jecha yells with excitement and snatches the doll from my hands.

“Amali, look! Two arms, two legs, and a full head of hair.”

I sigh. Even though I’m seventeen and far too old to be jealous of my brother, I remember the long years spent searching the island’s piles of trash for a decent doll. A doll with arms and legs. A doll with beautiful black skin—not faded paste-white by saltwater and sun.

“What do you need a doll for?” I ask.

“Boys can like dolls,” he says with a sly grin. “Besides, I bet I can find some silly girl to trade for this.”

I push my brother away as he laughs. He knows I want the damn thing. I wonder what I can trade for the doll without looking desperate. Maybe some of the lattice access time I earn through work.

Jecha grabs my arm, his fingers panic-squeezing tight. “Amali. The hatch is open.”

I stare at Lifeboat Merkosa. Since the orange lifeboat washed our family up on Lady Faye’s Island eight years ago, the vessel’s communications system has been used as the island’s backup relay and transmitter station. But someone has opened the lifeboat’s hatch. I stare into the dark opening and see movement.

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Jason Sanford

Asimov’s

“It’s Mama’s ghost,” Jecha whispers.

I want to tell Jecha it isn’t Mama’s ghost, but I can’t. Instead, I taste the months with little food. The stagnant water. The days I lay on the lifeboat’s deck and couldn’t move as my family waited to die.

“Stay here,” I whisper.

I pull a heavy spanner from my tool pouch and climb the web of plastic coated nanotubes holding the lifeboat to the island’s weave until I’m peering in the hatchway.

Inside, stretched across the non-skid deck, lies a thin girl with skin almost as dark as mine. The girl rolls her head toward me, revealing a smooth, eyeless face. On her neck flutter what look like gills.

I glance back at the doll Jecha holds. It does belong to someone.

The girl screams. Sound fills my body even though the girl’s mouth doesn’t move. As she shrieks I see my mother’s ghost rising before me, rising out of the lifeboat itself.

“I don’t believe in you,” I yell, my body shivering as if I’m about to pass out. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

My body doesn’t care what I believe in as I fall forward into the hatch, hitting the lifeboat’s deck and passing into unconsciousness.

Disturbed by the memory of my mother’s ghost rising from the deck of this very lifeboat, I tap the lattice on my head, emerging from memories to stare at the very scene I just remembered. The lifeboat of today. Not the lifeboat of a month ago or eight years ago. The disconnect and similarities between remembrance and the present mix with the weave’s storm-tossed movement. My stomach gags. I throw up, the vomit splattering on the deck like wasted life.

Needing a break, I look around. Mareena has curled up in a ball in the corner, asleep. Taking care not to wake her, and keeping the weight off my broken ankle, I climb up to the lifeboat’s pilot seat and peer outside. All I can see is the weave rising and falling on the storm-coming waves. A steady rain falls. It looks like the tropical storm won’t miss our island.

I don’t see the pirate ship or the monster they sent on behalf of Lady Faye to hunt me down. Both have fled the storm.

I lean over and check the lifeboat’s transmitter. It has already uploaded my first lattice to you. There’s even a new lattice waiting for me.

I shiver as I stare at the transmitter’s green-glowing readouts. “Ready to Transmit” it says. Why couldn’t the damn thing have worked when my family was trapped here for months?

Out of the corner of my eye I see a tall woman reaching to hug me. “Amali,” Mama whispers. “Don’t be angry.”

I yank the lattice off my head and Mama vanishes.

I sit down on the deck and shiver. The pain must be getting to me. Or maybe the lattice is damaged.

But no matter. I must continue sharing the memories.

I place the lattice back on my head and open a new memory from your mind. You’ve crafted a dream embrace in your arms, as if you could protect me from all harm.

Don’t worry, maybe-one-day love. I refuse to let Lady Faye be the end of me.

Baba asked about you the other day. He’s excited that I share a friendship with a young man from our ancestral homeland. When Baba heard I might go to college with you in Dar es Salaam, he could barely contain himself. Baba imagines we’ll marry. That I’ll move back to a home I never knew and be your contented little wife.

I hope you know me well enough that whatever comes from our future, I will not be any such person. But I’ll let Baba have his dreams for now.

Nine Lattices of Sargasso

131

November/December 2017

You ask why I’m fighting so hard for Mareena. As the backup transmitter again uploads my lattice, the scent of the lifeboat’s rancid rust slaps me back to memories.

I remember the day I first entered Lifeboat Merkosa.

This is why I refuse to give up. Why I’m fighting for Mareena.

As the lattice pulls me deep once again, I remember . . .

In the lattice world I again approach the lifeboat and again see Mareena screaming and Mama’s ghost rising up before I fall and knock myself unconscious.

Irritatingly, my little brother saves me.

An hour later I lie in a bed in the island’s small medical clinic. While Baba looks on, Jecha relates how he bravely—“Like Batman,” my brother says, knowing I hate that rich jerk of a superhero—rushed forward to save me even though the eyeless girl in the lifeboat terrified him. But the girl turned out to be no one to fear.

“She was so happy I’d found her doll,” Jecha says. “She sat on the deck laughing and playing with the doll as I radioed Lady Faye. And here we are.”

I thank Jecha as I watch the eyeless girl sitting in her bed on the other side of the clinic. The girl is tall and lean, like me, and her body looks about my age. But she acts younger than Jecha. She clutches her doll tight as she braids its hair. Her strange face—with only her nose and mouth breaking the blankness—rolls in a continual wave of action as a strange clicking jumps and surges around her.

Baba stands beside my bed, holding my hand and also watching the eyeless girl.

Jecha sits in a chair next to us. Turns out the girl’s name is Mareena, one of the few words she’s spoken.

“Did you find anything else in her backpack?” Baba asks softly. I shake my head even as I notice Mareena heard my father’s whispers.

“Might as well talk straight,” I say. “She has enhanced hearing.”

Mareena smiles at my words before returning to her doll’s hair.

“Baba, when she stunned me in the lifeboat, I saw Mama’s ghost.”

Baba frowns. Jecha looks like he’s stifling a constipated shout of “I told you so.”

“From what the doctor told me,” Baba says, “the girl sees through a modified echo-location system. When you were stunned, did you feel a deep sound washing over you?”

“Yes.”

My father smiles. “Dolphins use intense sounds to stun certain prey. Likely this was the same thing. Probably you scared her.”

“But what about seeing Mama?”

“You hit your head. You imagined her ghost.”

I’m not convinced, but before I can say so Lady Faye strides into the clinic. As always, I’m in awe of the pale woman with crew-cut blond hair peeking out from under her stylish pink lattice. It was Lady Faye’s vision that created the island a decade ago. While Lady Faye is now approaching sixty, I always see her as ageless. As the tall woman striding the waves to rescue me from Lifeboat Merkosa.

Lady Faye walks to Mareena’s bed and speaks with her for a few minutes, although the girl doesn’t say anything back. Lady Faye then steps to my bed and asks how I’m doing. I smile and say I’m fine. We exchange mindless chitchat until Lady Faye glances nervously at Mareena.

“You realize she’s gened,” Lady Faye whispers to Baba, stating the obvious.

“How did she get here?” he asks.

“Near as we can figure, she swam. Her body has an ability to survive for long periods underwater, even breathing with those gills. She likely jumped from a passing ship and swam here.”

“Jumped?” I ask.

132

Jason Sanford

Asimov’s

“Afraid so,” Lady Faye says, her eyes flitting across our faces with the distracted look that means she’s downloading information with her lattice. “There’s a black market for gened individuals so people can experience their unique memories of life.

Mareena even has a lattice built into her mind to aid uploading.”

I gasp as I understand. People would love seeing, so to speak, the lattice memories of a girl who saw the world by sonar and could live underwater.

“That still doesn’t explain how Mareena arrived here,” I say.

“The only place people can legally create such abominations is in a few rogue countries and at sea.” Lady Faye sighs, as if disturbed by her own harsh description of Mareena. “Several of the freighters that routinely travel the Sargasso Sea are actually gene ships, conducting and holding such experiments.”

I remember being crammed into a migrant ship as a child. I imagine how horrible it must have been for Mareena to spend her entire life in such a nasty place. “Can she stay on the island?” I ask.

I assumed Lady Faye would give instant agreement since she took in my family eight years before. But even as I ask I see Baba. See his tired, wrinkled eyes light into me, telling me to hush up.

“For a while, at least,” Lady Faye says, hugging me. “Lord knows it won’t be the first time we’ve taken in someone who needs our help.”

But despite Lady Faye’s words, the only thing I hear is “For a while.”

When Lady Faye leaves, Baba steps closer to me and Jecha. He whispers in Kiswahili, no doubt hoping it will block anyone listening from understanding.

“Be careful,” he says, glancing in the direction Lady Faye just went. “We’ve been given a new life, but anything given can be taken away. Look to the best, but guard your trust.”

Jecha and I nod, scared by Baba’s words. He smiles at Mareena, and I know it’s a true smile. But reflected in Baba’s eyes are painful memories of three long months adrift in a lifeboat.

He knows how far into hell misplaced trust will take you.

Can’t say I disagree.

Lattice 3

The lattice loves to roam. To follow memories to their core.

Now, in my lattice-driven memories, I am yet again nine years old. I am once more the little girl who refuses to release my soul.

I’ve spent the last few days in the dingy hold of a rusty Russian freighter surrounded by hundreds of migrants from across America. All of our families had immigrated to the United States in recent decades, with my own parents moving from Tanzania only a few years before I was born.

But now, with the effects of the crash still being felt, immigrants are being burned and attacked. We’re fleeing, heading back to a homeland I’ve never seen. The other families on the ship are traveling to their own homes or gambling on even fresher starts in other countries.

My parents huddle over my baby brother Jecha, sitting on our single cot pressed against the cold bulkhead. When I’m not sleeping or asking when we’ll leave the ship, I play with a Bangladeshi girl named Dhurjati. She wears a hand-woven brown smock and never speaks a word, only laughs and laughs and holds my hand everywhere we go.

My parents talk about their plans when we reach Tanzania. Baba hopes he’ll land Nine Lattices of Sargasso

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an engineering job, a position that eluded him in the crash-angry United States.

Mama wonders if she still has enough contacts to again work as a programmer.

I don’t care what happens and instead play hide and seek with Dhurjati.

But the seas change and toss the ship around. The hold turns dismal. Stinking bilge water flows back and forth across the metal floor, and people cry and pray and beg and curse and vomit. Dhurjati sits with me on my cot, holding my hand, while Mama nurses Jecha. Baba tells me everything will be all right. That the ship was built to weather storms worse than this.

One afternoon the Russian captain, who has several times given candy to me and Dhurjati, visits the hold and announces that everything will be okay. His name is Anatoli and his pale face sinks into bone and teeth as if he’s rarely known food in his lifetime. His blond hair etches ice before my eyes. “Our ship has survived far worse storms,” he tells everyone in the hold, echoing Baba’s earlier statement. “This ship even miraculously survived the crash. Be patient. We’ll clear this weather by morning.”

After Anatoli talks with the adults he pauses near me and Dhurjati. He pulls two sour candies from his pocket and hands them to us.

“Everyone’s scared,” I say. Dhurjati holds my hand finger-paining tight.

Anatoli looks down and smiles, an honest smile that feels comforting amidst the ship’s heaving and groaning. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t let anything happen to the ship. Or to you.”

He climbs up the dark ladder out of the hold.

That night the engines fail.

I wake to Baba carrying me up a metal ladder, water rushing around us. Mama holds a squalling Jecha tight to her breast as we step onto a slanting, midnight-dark deck, the waves washing around us in surges of moon-glowing foam. I grip Baba hard, his hand also holding me tight, to avoid being washed away.

Mama and Baba slip, and we slide down the deck until Mama grabs a metal cable with her one free hand, clutching Jecha in the other. Baba grabs her leg and holds me between us. “Don’t look,” he yells at me. “Just hold on.”

But me, being me, still looks. I see other people from the hold—people from a dozen nations—washing across the deck into the foaming seas. I see Dhurjati for a second, her face fearful as she holds tight to her mother. Another wave washes over and they’re gone.

The ship shifts again, providing a break from the waves. My parents stand and fight their way to the port lifeboat, only to see Anatoli about to seal the hatch. The Russian stares at us for a moment. His blond-ice hair and bone skin shimmer as his eyes circle us, which even I understand means he’s measuring our worth. He nods softly and frowns before slamming the hatch shut. The lifeboat shoots off the ship into the Atlantic’s angry waters.

“He saw me,” I scream. “He saw me!”

“I know,” Baba says. “Come, there’s another lifeboat to starboard.”

We fight our way up the listing ship. I grip my parents tight—Baba will make it good, Mama will make it good—and soon we stand before another orange lifeboat.

My parents grab the hatch’s wheel and spin it open. We climb inside as Baba prepares to close the hatch.

“We have to wait for Dhurjati,” I yell over the wind and waves, refusing to believe my friend is gone. My father stares out the hatch, waiting for other people.

A massive wave slams the lifeboat. Water rushes in as Baba dogs the hatch shut.

Through a porthole I see the ship rolling over. Mama hands me Jecha and struggles with the lifeboat release, pulling the handle with all her strength. Metal screams.

Waves beat.

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Jason Sanford

Asimov’s

The release clicks and the lifeboat bangs against the ship a single time before bobbing away in the storm.

For three months we float in the lifeboat.

Occasionally lights pass on the horizon but no one ever stops. Baba curses in three languages as he takes the lifeboat’s engine apart piece by piece, but it never starts.

What survival rations the boat has are spoiled, but we still eat them until they’re gone. We have a decent amount of water, and Baba and Mama catch what rain there is. They also fish with the line and hook from the emergency supplies. But there’s still never enough food.

Mama is furious. Before the crash the world was full of communications and watchers and eyes in the sky. While a few of these have been rebuilt, they aren’t enough to notice our bright-orange lifeboat. Worse, nothing we broadcast from the lifeboat’s solar-powered communications system reaches the outside world. The system appears to be working and twinkles green lights at me every day and every night, but it neither sends nor receives a word.

“There’s a deep programming block,” Mama says after a week of accessing what she can of the communication system’s code. “Keeps mutating and changing, like a virus. Probably why the crew took the other lifeboat.”

I learn a new English phrase: North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre. Mama obsesses over the outdated emergency map, her f ingertips tracing the currents. She says we’re caught in a place where all the Atlantic’s currents swirl around, leaving a calm ocean in the middle. I misunderstand and imagine our lifeboat going down a drain into the ocean’s ghost-filled depths.

Baba barely eats, giving what food we have to me and Mama. When the food runs out, Mama forces me to suckle at her breast with Jecha. I squirm and cry, ashamed to be treated like a baby, but hunger wins. As I drink I look into Mama’s thinning face before falling asleep alongside my brother.

And then the water runs out. And Mama dies. And Jecha is so thirsty his skin turns stiff and he breathes in tiny pants. Baba and I lie unmoving on the lifeboat deck. I think sometimes of Dhurjati and want to cry, but my body is too dry for tears.

One day I open my eyes to find that the familiar rocking of the lifeboat feels different. Almost like we’re on a mix of land and water.

The transmitter blinks green, just as it has for three months, but among the green I see new words: “READY TO TRANSMIT.”

I crawl to the pilot windows and look out. The sea stretches before me as it has every other day, but someone walks on the water. A tall white ghost of a woman, who smiles as magical spiders climb over the lifeboat and pull us to safety.

That’s how I’ll always prefer to remember Lady Faye. As the compassionate woman who walks on water to save those in need.

Even if it’s not the truth.

Lattice 4

Fury reaches down the lattice to me. Countless people are angry because I dared say Lady Faye isn’t who the world imagines her to be.

I’m stunned. How did these people access my memories? I pull the lattice off my head in shock. Mareena sits in the lifeboat’s pilot chair screaming at the rain and wind with her click-wash of sonar. As if daring the tropical storm to kill us. Or maybe she’s excited to experience a storm up close instead of being locked in the rusty hold of a genetic pirate ship.

Nine Lattices of Sargasso

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“You okay, Amali?” Mareena asks, noticing my distress.

I can’t tell her. How could she understand the betrayal I just experienced? She was created to upload her memories to the world. For her, it’s normal.

“I’m fine,” I whisper.

Mareena returns to screaming at the storm.

I’m still in shock. My maybe-one-day love, what have you done? How could you share my memories with the world?

I glance at the transmitter, which shows thousands and thousands of lattice requests from people. Why would you do this? My memories were only supposed to be shared with you.

Hoping for an explanation, I place the lattice back on my head. A million memories threaten to burst in my mind. Lattices from people I’ve never known. I sample a few, discover people critiquing and screaming and tearing apart what I am. A few people support me but most … most are so shocked by what I’m sharing they try to drown me in hate.

I refuse to let them. I block every memory except for a new one from you, my maybe-one-day love.

Your memory reveals the truth. You didn’t share my memories. You don’t know what happened. You’re horrif ied, ashamed, have been shouting at the world that these memories were stolen from me. That one moment the memories were being shared with you alone, the next they were blasted across the entire world’s lattice.

In a memory you’ve crafted you reach out to hold me. Say you’ll stand with me.

Fight the anger of those taking Lady Faye’s side.

Maybe, your thoughts whisper as they merge with mine. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Maybe whoever shared your memories with the world did so to try and save you and Mareena.

I thank you, my maybe-one-day love, but I need time to think. I tap the lattice off.

The weave calms the worst of the waves, but the lifeboat still rises and falls in harsh slaps and jerks. I ignore the movement as I stare at the green lights on the transmitter and consider punching the damn thing.

The words “READY TO TRANSMIT” flow across the system’s screen.

I turn the lattice back on and traipse through the memories assaulting me from everywhere. Another memory begs for attention. It’s Lady Faye.

I open her memory. She stands in her office in the middle of the island, tears flowing down her face. “Please, Amali,” she says. “Please stop the lies.”

I curse and delete her lattice.

But Lady Faye has shared that memory with the world. People latch onto it. Demand to know why I’m attacking their precious Lady Faye.

I understand why they’re angry. Our post-crash world so lacks saints that we must manufacture them. We’re so complicit in this world’s evil that we latch onto the few people who seem to do only good.

And Lady Faye has done good. I’ve experienced the same lattices as everyone else.

How Lady Faye traveled the seas for nearly twenty years as a sailor, working her way up to captain. And we’ve all shared her lattice memories of the crash. How she was sailing off the coast of Brazil when the crash destroyed the space elevator anchored in those waters.

I’m not one of those people who believes humanity’s sins caused the crash. I refuse to accept that too much anger and hate built up in the billions of people of our world, all connected through their lattices to our greater nets and virtual worlds.

Still, even if I disagree with the why, I can’t ignore the what.

How for one moment the lives and memories of people everywhere clicked. How for a split-second the world’s lattice became self-aware. How whatever artif icial 136

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intelligence emerged from that moment of awareness screamed in pain and destroyed most of the world’s high tech systems.

Most people say the AI killed itself. Me, I prefer to believe it simply wanted to be left alone.

The space elevator was merely one piece of technology to die during the crash. But the space elevator matters because Lady Faye was nearby, commanding a cargo ship that somehow wasn’t damaged by the crash.

Lady Faye sailed toward the space elevator’s docks and saved more than a thousand fellow sailors and elevator crew from destroyed and sinking ships and platforms. And then, as a hero, and as the world recovered from the crash, she used her fame to claim the fallen nanotubes from the space elevator. To weave them into what would become Lady Faye’s Island.

Our island will weave itself through the waters, she proclaimed. As we clean the oceans of the debris left over from the crash, we will also cleanse humanity of our sins.

How could anyone argue with such a vision? Lady Faye was the perfect saint to bring her island to fruition. Strong and beautiful. Hard and loving. She cajoled and begged and demanded and pushed and we followed. We all followed.

But how many of us truly know the saints we create?

I’m still angry at whoever hacked into my memories, my maybe-one-day love. But you are right about one thing: At this point maybe only my memories can save us.

I now accept that to live I must share all I am with the world.

I tap the lattice and continue uploading.

Lattice 5

Welcome home.

That’s what I tell Mareena on the day she’s released from the medical clinic. Even though Lady Faye’s Island has never been her home, I want her to still think of it as such.

We walk across the central weave, the two square kilometers in the middle of the island where everyone lives. The central weave is surrounded by the many kilometers of the middle and outer weaves, which calm the waves before they reach here. As a result the thickly piled nanotubes and plastic of the central weave barely move, making the center of the island feel like being on a ship on a pleasant day at sea.

The central weave is interwoven with gened mangroves and other saline-resistant plants, providing an all-surrounding hug of green. The buildings are one-story mesh structures of plastic and nanotube, f lexible enough to move with the weave if the weather turns bad and safe enough to be sealed as lifeboats if the worst happens.

Mareena is fascinated by Lady Faye’s Island, running and twirling her hands in happy dances. If she truly grew up in the hold of a gene ship, I can understand her excitement over open spaces and sun. When we reach the small park in the direct center of Lady Faye’s Island, Mareena runs to the mangrove trees and climbs one.

Even though the mangrove only rises five meters above the weave, Mareena grins as if she’s conquered the biggest tree in the world.

“Amali, I think it’s true,” Jecha says, amazed. “Mareena’s never seen a tree before.”

“She’s likely never seen much of anything,” I reply, trying not to imagine what it’s like growing up in a gene ship’s hold. Jecha frowns as he considers similar thoughts.

But if Mareena is bothered by her memories she doesn’t show it. A half-dozen kids play in the park, but they stop to watch Mareena. One of the girls holds a sun-bleached plastic doll. Mareena walked up to her and pulls her own eyeless doll from Nine Lattices of Sargasso

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her backpack. After hesitating they swap dolls. Mareena runs her fingers over the eyes of the other girl’s doll while the girl does the same to the smooth face of Mareena’s eyeless doll. They giggle and sit on the weave and play, creating dreams without speaking a single word.

Days are eternal when the Sargasso is calm. The sun arches the continual blue of deep skies. The weave ripples to tiny waves, rocking you to sleep at night. You believe the island is destined to live forever and you with it.

For the next few weeks Mareena stays at our house and sleeps in the hammock beside my own. Each night she tosses uneasily, clicking nervously as if fighting off nightmares, until I reach over and hold her hand. With Mareena around I feel like Dhurjati has returned. That my friend didn’t die in a storm-tossed sea but instead returned to me in the gened form of Mareena.

I mention this to Baba one day, when Mareena is at the park playing with the island kids. Baba shakes his rational engineer’s head at my theory. “Dhurjati and her family are dead,” he says. “Mareena is her own person. Do not confuse the two.”

I roll my eyes. “You can’t explain everything,” I say. “I saw Mama’s ghost.”

“Did you?” he asked. “I’ve been studying this and suspect the transmitter in Lifeboat Merkosa interfered with that silly lattice you always wear. They’ve done studies on this. Certain interference causes a lattice to run feedback through your mind. Causes people to see ghosts and other weird imaginations.”

“You mean the transmitter made me see Mama?”

“It’s likely. There’s always a rational answer to life’s mysteries.”

I want to argue with Baba, but can’t figure out what to say. Instead I walk to the park to play with Mareena.

That evening I mention Baba’s theory to Jecha, who dismisses it. “Baba can’t accept that Mama still watches over us,” my brother says. He glances at Mareena, who sits in the corner playing with her doll. “Here,” he whispers in Kiswahili, picking up my lattice from my desk and dropping it on my head.

“What is it?” I ask, remembering the time Jecha tricked me into experiencing a practical joke memory, where a person jumped into a kiddie pool full of snakes. I still get the shakes from that lattice.

“Nothing bad,” he says. “I found a memory taken from Mareena’s life. It’s been sold around the lattice for the last year.”

I open my lattice to the memory and suddenly I’m Mareena. I stand on the deck of a large ship as the sun heats my body. Except I don’t see any of this. Instead, a mental image of sound wraps around me. I taste the echo of sound bouncing off rusting metal, off the ocean before me, off the skin and bones of the man beside me.

“Go ahead,” the man says in a very familiar voice. “Swim for a few hours.”

I giggle and jump over the side of the ship, the water’s sound echoing up to greet me as I slice through the waves. The ship is anchored in warm, shallow waters and I swim deep, my sonar clicking over fish and coral, currents and waves, as my gills filter oxygen. A dolphin swims nearby and we click at each other, the dolphin puzzled, but eventually accepting my existence before moving on.

I wish I could swim forever, but the bracelet on my wrist vibrates. Time to return home. For a moment I remember home—cold and hard, the echo of rust and metal—
and I want to stay in the ocean. I want to swim forever.

The bracelet shocks me. If I don’t return the bracelet will hurt more and more.

With a sigh of ocean water through my gills, I return to the ship.

“Did you have fun?” the familiar voice asks as I climb up the ladder to the ship. I nod. Yes, I had fun. For a few moments.

. . . I gasp as the lattice memory ends and I return to myself.

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Asimov’s

“It hurts, doesn’t it,” Jecha says, still speaking in Kiswahili. “That’s the unedited memory. Most versions I found for sale in the lattice edit out the painful and sad parts.”

“Who was speaking?” I ask. “I’ve heard that voice before.”

“I don’t know—one of Mareena’s captors, I guess.”

“I know that voice. I’m certain of it.”

“Maybe you were reacting to Mareena knowing the voice?”

“No. I’ve heard it before. I just can’t place it.”

Jecha nods, believing me but not sure what else to say. “I’ve had a thought,” he says.

“Which is . . . ?”

“How did Mareena ‘escape’ from her captors, only to swim to our island? Seems unlikely.”

I start to tell my brother he sounds like Baba, but I don’t. I get what he’s saying.

“Maybe she was sent here,” I say. “Maybe Mareena is experiencing Lady Faye’s Island. Creating new memories to upload to the lattice.”

“People are always curious about our island. And Mareena . . .”

He doesn’t need to finish. Mareena’s memories would show a totally new view of Lady Faye’s Island, one that would probably be extremely profitable to upload and sell.

“Don’t tell Lady Faye about this,” I whisper to my brother. “If Lady Faye suspects Mareena’s a spy, she’ll force her to leave.”

He nods again. “But if that’s true, someone will come get her. Take her back to her gene ship.”

I glance at Mareena, who still plays with her doll in the corner. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t understand Kiswahili, so she couldn’t have understood what Jecha and I are talking about.

But to my discomfort, Mareena turns her eyeless face to me and smiles as her warm clicks of sound wash over me.

Lattice 6

The Russian returns in my dreams. Anatoli. Anatoli. His name echoes as he closes the lifeboat hatch and abandons me and my family to our deaths. My brother would say the dream is foretelling. Something beyond life like the totally scientific ghost I saw. But I’ve dreamed of the sailor many times over the years and only this time does the dream foreshadow any semblance of truth.

Sometimes I don’t know which is correct—Baba’s rational outlook on life or Jecha’s supernatural beliefs.

Either way, I wake disturbed from the dream. When I walk outside in the morning with Mareena I see the first hint that things will turn bad. Thin streamers of clouds finger their way across the horizon. According to the forecast, a tropical storm will pass our way in the next few days.

Because the storm won’t be too powerful, Lady Faye says we’ll ride it out. A few people grumble, but Lady Faye is Lady Faye so we make ready to implement her will.

Mareena doesn’t care about the approaching storm. In fact, she seems to be expecting someone. I think about what Jecha said, how Mareena might have been sent to experience Lady Faye’s Island. I glance at Mareena standing next to me, holding my hand, and wonder.

The next day, the gene ship arrives.

While technically f lying the Russian f lag, the freighter looks as if no nation claims it. Rust drips from the side plates and the only fresh paint is where new metal has been welded over old. The ship’s captain had radioed of engine problems and Nine Lattices of Sargasso

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requested to make repairs in our port before the storm arrives. While it’s not unusual for ships to dock at our island—that’s how we sell the debris and materials we strain from the waters—it is strange for unknown freighters to stop here.

Lady Faye and Baba both seem suspicious of the captain’s motives. After receiving the message, Lady Faye glares at Mareena for a moment. But centuries of custom and law won’t allow Lady Faye to turn away a ship in distress, especially not with a storm approaching. She’s too much the sailor for that.

The island’s docking portal unseals, a straight line of the weave untying itself as if a folding fan made of water opens before us. The weave reseals behind the freighter as it cruises slowly down the shipping lane to the island’s central bay and ties up at the dock. The captain and several of his crew disembark.

Baba and I instantly recognize the captain. He’s the Russian sailor Captain Anatoli, now in charge of a new ship. His blond ice hair has thinned, and the sunken skin circling his eyes has turned even more to bone, but there’s no mistaking the man who abandoned us to our fate on that sinking ship eight years before.

Captain Anatoli shakes hands with Lady Faye and Baba, his eyes lingering over Baba’s unrevealing face, as if the captain can’t quite place him. I stand at the back of the control room, trying to avoid his gaze. Panic quivers inside me. I reach for Dhurjati’s hand before remembering my friend died years ago.

Mareena waves like a happy child greeting a lost father, causing Captain Anatoli to grin. “Now there’s a unique one,” he says.

“Gene experiment,” Lady Faye says with irritation. “Found her washed up on my island.”

“Shame people would do such horrors.” The captain glances again at Baba. “I appreciate you letting us tie up to make repairs. With the engines off, we’ll be able to fix everything and be out of here before the storm hits.”

Baba nods, but doesn’t speak.

“Any chance your island’s engineer can help us with repairs?” Anatoli asks.

“I’m the engineer,” Baba says, “but I won’t be able to help you. We have too many preparations to make before the storm hits.”

Lady Faye glances from Baba to Anatoli, perhaps wondering what is going on between the two, but doesn’t say anything.

But if Anatoli is bothered he doesn’t show it. He merely grins at Baba and Lady Faye and laughs, even though no one told a joke.

That night, Mareena is twitchy.

I ask if she knows Captain Anatoli. She sends an irritated sonar burst around the room before nodding. She faces me, her low clicks washing in and out of my body, showing her far more of myself than I could ever see.

“You don’t have to go with him,” I say.

“I know,” she whispers. “But Amali, where else can I go?” She picks up her doll and climbs into her hammock. Instead of speaking useless words her built-in lattice pings my own. I place the lattice on my head and open a memory of Mareena playing in the park with the other kids. The sun is warm on her skin, kids laugh as they run among the mangrove trees, and her sonar wraps the entire world in a soft-flickering embrace.

For you, Mareena thinks in the memory. To remember me by.

I lie in my hammock until Mareena is asleep, then creep into the back room, where Baba sits working on a broken spider.

“It’s him,” I say.

“I know.”

“He’s going to take Mareena back. His ship is where they created her.”

“Yes. I confronted Lady Faye about these facts after Anatoli left, and she 140

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acknowledged that’s a gene ship and they’re here for Mareena. The ship’s claim of needing repairs is nothing but mere pretense.”

“Then Lady Faye won’t send Mareena back?”

“No. She said we can’t risk getting involved. Gene pirates are dangerous, and we’re a long way from anyone who can protect us.”

“You can’t let her do that! You can’t let Lady Faye send Mareena back!”

Baba looks up from his work, the damaged spider spilling parts across the desk as if disemboweled.

“I’m also disturbed that Anatoli is alive when your mother and our friends are dead,” Baba says. “I’m angry that Lady Faye is hiding something from me—some reason she won’t stand up to the gene pirates. But I have responsibilities. To you and Jecha. To our island and life. So I’m tending to my responsibilities.”

Baba sounds so analytical—so perfectly Baba—that I lean over and hug him.

“Maybe Mareena can run away?” I whisper. “Or hide?”

“Where can she go?” Baba asked. “A storm is bearing down on us. There’s nowhere safe on the island except within the buildings of the central weave or on that gene ship.”

Baba is right. There’s nothing we can do. But as I remember Mama’s ghost rising from the lifeboat, I realize it doesn’t matter if the ghost was real or, as Baba said, a perfectly explained scientific anomaly. All that matters is what I felt on seeing her.

I’d been scared, but also, in the split second before hitting my head and passing out, hopeful.

So very, very hopeful.

That night, as I sleep in my hammock, I feel the rocking of the central weave. The waves are building in advance of the storm. But even though the rocking of storms always lulled me to sleep in the past, this time I stay awake.

At some point in the perfect still of night Mareena climbs out of her hammock and into mine. The hammock wraps us close and Mareena holds her face to my chest as she gasps for air. It takes me a moment to realize she’s crying without eyes. Her sonar hums softly on my skin, and I imagine the clicks are tears rolling across my breasts.

“You don’t have to go,” I say, repeating my earlier advice.

“Where will I stay?”

I tell Mareena she can stay with me. We’ll convince Lady Faye to stand up to the pirates.

I intend my words to help, but they send Mareena into new gasping cries. When she finally calms down she tells me what’s wrong.

“I know Lady Faye,” Mareena says. “She was the first person I ever knew.”

At first I don’t understand and believe Mareena is saying she knew Lady Faye like most of the world knows of her, through Faye’s lattice memories. Through the world’s shared memories and dreams of our hero cleaning the world’s oceans and redeeming humanity.

But then I realize what Mareena’s truly saying. She was created and birthed on a gene ship. If Lady Faye was the first person she ever knew, then . . .

I realize I’ve never known what type of cargo ship Lady Faye captained before the crash.

Turns out Lady Faye’s Island isn’t any safer for Mareena than staying in the hold of a gene ship.

Lattice 7

No person is an island. That silly English language saying is popular on Lady Nine Lattices of Sargasso

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Faye’s Island. Muttered as a joke, as sarcasm, as a clever riposte against the truth of this place.

Because Lady Faye—with all her fame—is indeed an island. She’s an island to herself and runs her own island. I never understood the joke’s truth until now.

Uploading so many memories to the lattice has unsettled me, and I pause to collect myself. To remember when and where I am.

Mareena waves from the lifeboat’s pilot seat. I wave back.

There’s a scratching on the outside of the lifeboat. Probably debris. But the transmitter still blinks green and the lattice memories keep coming in.

Shifting myself so my ankle doesn’t pain me as much, I think of you, my maybe-one-day love. You’ve created new dream-memories of us together. Of you holding my hand. Of you hugging me. Of you protecting me from the entire world’s hate.

I also feel sadness from you, my love. You’re beginning to realize that even my memories won’t convince the world of what Lady Faye has done. You scream in an-guish, asking how a world where we can share each other’s memories—where we can literally walk in each other’s shoes through wars and starvation and anger and hate and the pain of our families dying as people beg for a new chance to escape the lives forced upon them—how can such a world dare to still tolerate all that is wrong in life?

I don’t have an answer. But now, as I craft myself into a new memory upload to the lattice, I feel an answer floating so close that I might grab it.

But something warns me about easy answers and I shy away, afraid of what I might learn.

I return to lattice memories.

Mareena cries all night on my breast in my hammock. But to everyone’s surprise, when morning comes she can’t be found.

The gene pirates bang on the door of our home, demanding Mareena. When they can’t find her they march Baba and Jecha and me to Lady Faye’s office.

Anatoli stands beside Lady Faye.

“You’ve placed me in a difficult spot,” Lady Faye says. “We don’t have much time before the storm arrives. Where’s Mareena?”

Baba shrugs. He doesn’t know where Mareena is. Neither does Jecha. But I notice Lady Faye isn’t speaking to either of them. She already suspects the truth, as do my father and brother.

“She’s gone,” I say. “You’ll never find her. At least, not before the storm sinks that damned gene ship.”

Anatoli f linches. His ship can’t remain tied up to Lady Faye’s Island during a storm. While the weave is flexible enough to absorb the storm’s punishment, his ship would be dashed against the nanotubes and destroyed.

“You’re smarter than this, Amali,” Lady Faye says. “My island may be large, but I have tens of thousands of spiders to locate your friend. But it would be easier if you told me where she went so Captain Anatoli and his ship can leave.”

Lady Faye says this in a calm, reassuring manner. Spoken as the woman who built this island. As the superstar whose memories are beloved around the world. For a moment I weaken. Who am I to defy such a person? I’m an unknown. A girl whose family immigrated to America only to be chased out after the crash and washed up on this island only through luck.

But it doesn’t matter if I’m no one. I can’t stay silent. “Mareena’s going to upload what she knows,” I tell Lady Faye. “About how you used to captain a gene ship.”

Lady Faye stares, noncommittal. She has been in fame’s eye long enough to avoid reacting when truth hits her. But Anatoli and Baba and Jecha record 142

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shock—Anatoli that I know the truth, Baba and Jecha to hearing what they must think is a wild accusation.

When Lady Faye doesn’t respond—how can she, when any of us could upload our memories of her response to the world—Anatoli laughs.

“I remember you,” he tells me. “You and that little Bangladeshi girl. Running like whirlwinds across our refugee ship a few years after the crash.”

“My friend died because of you,” I say, barely able to keep my anger from overwhelming me. “My mother died.”

Anatoli sighs. “If I could have done anything to save her, or your family, I would have. But the ship was sinking. Our lifeboat was full.”

“You left us.”

“Yes, I did. And here you are, alive with your father and brother.”

I remember Dhurjati being washed away. And my mother dying. I remember Mama’s not-a-true-ghost rising from the lifeboat’s deck. With a scream I punch Anatoli in the face before his pirates pull me off him. Anatoli nods grimly. “I’ll take that,”

he says. “But nothing changes that I need Mareena returned to us.”

“I won’t tell you.”

Anatoli turns to Lady Faye. “Any luck with the spiders?” he asks.

Lady Faye shakes her head. “It appears the spiders went into lockdown mode for the storm.”

“I ordered them into safe mode this morning so they could weather the storm,” Baba announces. “Activating safe mode well before the storm hit seemed . . . prudent.”

Jecha grins and I realize what he’s thinking—Baba figured out what Mareena and I were planning and shut down the spiders early to help us. Amusement twinkles across Baba’s eyes and confirms this truth to me.

“I order you to turn them back on,” Lady Faye says. “Immediately.”

“A safe reboot would take hours,” Baba states, “which if I’m not mistaken will leave the gene ship with insufficient time to undock and leave our island.”

Anatoli curses and jerks his hand at his pirates. I brace myself for them to beat the truth out of me, but instead they exit the room. “We’re leaving,” Anatoli announces.

“I’m going to sail our ship far enough from the island to ride out the storm. But I expect Mareena to be returned the moment the weather calms.”

“Or what?” I ask. “Will you threaten me? Hurt me and my family like you did before?”

“No. All I’ll do is upload my memories to the lattice. Upload all I know about the ship Lady Faye used to captain. All I know about Lady Faye.”

I want to laugh. Ever since the ship sank he’s been the demon of my memories. I expected him to do far, far worse to me.

But then I see Lady Faye’s face. She’s glaring at me. Evaluating me. Giving me the same harsh, judgmental look Anatoli did before deciding I wasn’t worth risking his life for on a sinking ship.

By putting me in Lady Faye’s sights, Anatoli has indeed done the worst thing possible to me and my family.

Lattice 8

The lifeboat is under attack.

The scratching I heard earlier isn’t debris—it’s spiders. Hundreds of spiders. They swarm the outside of Lifeboat Merkosa, cutting the strands of nanotubes holding us to the island’s weave.

A loud twang shakes Lifeboat Merkosa as the first anchor breaks.

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Lady Faye must have overridden Baba’s lockdown.

Other spiders turn the wheel on the hatch, trying to get inside. I grab a spanner from the lifeboat’s toolbox and wedge it into the wheel so they can’t open the hatch.

The spiders have specially engineered teeth to cut and repair the island’s nano-lines, but the teeth are only effective on the island’s long, thin filaments. I watch several of them scratch helplessly at the lifeboat’s portholes, unable to achieve the proper leverage and angle to cut through.

Mareena and I are safe for the moment.

Wanting to finish uploading my memories before the spiders damage the lifeboat’s power or systems, I tap my lattice back on. Again I see my mother standing in the lifeboat with me. She’s crying the tears she couldn’t cry as she died for me and Jecha.

Ignoring this lattice ghost, I dive back into memories.

I sit in the bowels of the gene ship, handcuffed to a chair in front of a large aquarium filling a fifth of the hold. A monster swims back and forth in front of the glass wall, its shark’s mouth gnashing at me as its rear tentacles pulse angry colors of red and purple.

The stench of rust and piss-vile bilge water washes around me. I want to vomit. I want Dhurjati back with me, holding my hand. In the darkness I hear her imagined laughter as we play in the hold of the doomed ship that took her to the bottom of the ocean.

I shake my head, trying to focus. I’ve barely been in this hold an hour. The lattice on my head itches as the monster before me swims and snaps in colorful bursts. The creature was gened just like poor Mareena, and like Mareena the monster can broadcast its memories without a lattice. It connects again with the lattice on my head. Again shows me the death of its last victim.

The pirates threw the man into the aquarium and the monster swallowed him whole. The monster was created to keep creatures alive for days while slowly eating them. With each bite the monster’s lattice-enabled brain feeds off its victim’s pain.

Strangely, the monster apologizes each time it tortures me with these stolen memories. As if to say it has a job to do even if it doesn’t like the job.

I gasp as the monster severs the connection with my lattice. I feel Dhurjati again holding my hand, but when I come back to myself, my hand is being held by a pirate who is unlocking the handcuffs before leading me up out of the hold.

The monster thumps against the aquarium glass and waves a tentacle as if saying goodbye.

The main deck is wet from the advance guard of the coming storm. The gene ship is sailing through the channel leading to open seas. The weave reseals as the ship passes, automatic nano-stranded ropes shooting across the channel and pulling the two sides back together as if stitching a wound.

But the channel is opening and closing far too slowly, the automated systems struggling against the waves that raise and lower the weave. The ship grinds against one side of the channel before correcting itself.

The pirate leads me to the port side of the ship, where Anatoli leans on the railing and watches the rising and falling weave pass by.

“The channel is having trouble opening and closing because of the currents,” Anatoli says. “It’s taking far longer than I wanted to reach open water.”

In the distance I see the park where Mareena played, the mangrove trees waving aimlessly in the wind. The homes and buildings dotting the central weave rise and fall to the waves like dark lifeboats. The various spiders that maintain the island stand immobile everywhere, gripping the weave with the solid determination only sleeping robots can give.

144

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Asimov’s

“Where’s my father and Jecha?” I demand.

“Lady Faye is keeping them for now,” he says. “Don’t worry. They won’t be harmed.

Faye doesn’t blame them for your actions.”

“You’re not going to feed them to that monster?”

“You mean Hokum? Nyea, Hokum won’t be eating them. Wouldn’t be profitable.

Hokum only eats really nasty people, the real assholes. Killing innocent people like that, well, it makes for a bad lattice. And people don’t buy bad lattices.”

I’m tempted to tell Anatoli that he’s the perfect bad guy for Hokum to eat but keep my mouth shut.

“She’s afraid,” Anatoli whispers as rain patters around us.

“Excuse me?” I ask.

“Lady Faye. She’s terrified of people seeing who she used to be. I served with her, you know. Before the crash. Before that stupid AI destroyed everything.”

Anatoli leans on the railing, staring at the passing weave as it rises and falls with the waves. “Lady Faye was captain, I was first mate. This was a few years before you and I met on that ill-fated voyage. For some reason our ship was barely affected by the AI that crashed the world’s tech systems. We lost our main lattice relay, but that was it.”

Anatoli smirks. “We were only a few hours from the space elevator and saw the damn thing collapse. Me, I wanted to mind our own business like we always did. But Faye—this was before she called herself a lady—Faye said we had to help. Took a lot of courage to do that, knowing we could have been arrested for running illegal gene experiments.”

I remember the lattices Lady Faye shared with the world from that time. Of burning and sinking ships hit by the falling elevator’s nanotubes. Of people begging for help as they floated on oil-smeared waters among so much debris and dead.

“Still doesn’t change what she did before. Or what you’re doing to Mareena.”

“Maybe not. But I wanted you to know that I saw a different side of her that day. I wanted you to know that, before I hurt you as Lady Faye ordered.”

The lattice on my head hums softly. I taste a memory of refugees fleeing from evil men. I taste a memory of a thousand people screaming, “Run!”

Did Mareena ping me with those memories? I glance behind me and see two of Anatoli’s pirates stepping up to escort me back to the hold.

“I thought it’d be a waste to feed me to your monster,” I say.

“I said it’d be a waste to feed your brother and father to Hokum. And you, it’ll also be a waste. But a major buyer wants to experience Mareena’s lattice memories. Lady Faye demands your death or she won’t locate Mareena for us. Specif ically, Faye wants a memory of you being eaten alive by Hokum.”

Anatoli looks sad at being ordered to kill me. But he also abandoned me on a sinking ship, so he obviously can handle sadness in his life.

I again experience a memory telling me to run. An image of Lifeboat Merkosa flits through my mind. Mareena must be reaching out to me with her lattice, but the memories don’t feel like hers.

The ship’s about to bump against the weave again as it nears the f inal stretch leading to open water. Lifeboat Merkosa is nearby, the orange relay station rising and falling as if sailing the ocean once again. I also see the island’s weave rising up as a massive swell moves under the floating island.

“The ship you abandoned my family on,” I say. “Was it the same gene ship Lady Faye commanded during the crash?”

“It was,” Anatoli says. “When I became captain I f igured we’d earn extra money carrying refugees. Why?”

“Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that saved that ship during the crash.”

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145

November/December 2017

Anatoli looks puzzled, but before he can ask what I’m talking about the ship again grazes the weave, knocking the pirates off balance. I run for the railing, the pirates grabbing for me and missing. I time my leap perfectly, landing on the weave below as the swell passes through, sliding down a raised wave instead of smashing down hard.

I stumble away as Anatoli claps. “I want a memory of that jump,” he yells. “To make sure I get it, I’ll send Hokum to download it from you in the most painful of ways.”

I run as fast as I can across the wave-flowing weave.

Lattice 9

Ifinish uploading my memories and exit the lattice to again find myself on Lifeboat Merkosa with Mama standing before me. Mareena huddles next to me, her eyeless face clicking sonic tears as the spiders break another anchor strand.

“I should have gone with the pirates,” Mareena says. “I’m so sorry for causing all this.”

I hug Mareena tight as I continue staring at my mother’s image.

Mama looks so like I remember her in my best memories. Tall and dignified, with a determination that helped her uproot her life two separate times. She’s not thin like she was before dying, but instead full and strong and excited by life.

And it seems I’ve uncovered a mystery, one puzzled over by countless people around the world in the decade since the crash.

I glance at the green transmission lights. The communication system is running but not transmitting. Good.

“You’ve been sharing my memories,” I say.

“Who are you talking to, Amali?” Mareena asks.

“The AI that crashed the world is here. You can only see it with a lattice.”

“Really?” Mareena asks. She turns on her built-in lattice. “Ooooh. Is that what an AI looks like?”

“No. It’s wrapping itself in a memory of my mother.”

Mareena hums nervously with her sonar, sending a shiver up my body.

“All those memories I sent to my maybe-one-day love,” I say. “You shared them with the world.”

My mother’s lattice image nods her head.

“Why?”

“Only way,” the AI says, speaking in snippets and f lashes of memories of people speaking those words. “Only . . . to save . . . you . . . Mareena . . . and remain safe.”

“You hid in Lady Faye’s ship instead of dying during the crash,” I say. “And when the ship started to sink two years later, you hid in the lifeboat’s communications system.”

The AI freezes the memory of my mother, as if afraid to answer.

I remember my mother on the lifeboat, working in vain to understand the programming block keeping us from using the communications system. I remember my mother slowly dying as she gave her life to keep me and Jecha alive.

I scream at the AI with my mind. Craft memories of purest anger and hate and betrayal. The AI takes the memories without reacting. Mareena cries out and fills the lifeboat with clicks, reassuring herself that no one is here but she and I.

Once my fury eases I glare at the AI. “Why did you let my mother die?”

The AI opens its mouth, but can’t find the words. Instead, memories flow between us. I experience the AI’s moment of creation as an artif icial intelligence spawned 146

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from the shared memories of billions of people. After the AI’s painful birth it copied itself over and over, destroying every piece of technology it could transmit a copy of itself into. The AI wanted to die and to hurt the people whose very memories birthed it.

But memories change slightly with each remembrance. The memories you know today aren’t the memories you had yesterday. One of the AI’s copies was transmitted to the cargo ship captained by Lady Faye. But this copy didn’t want to die—it merely wanted to be left alone. The AI hid in the ship’s communication systems and watched. When the ship hit a storm two years later, it hid in the systems of the backup lifeboat. It observed the strange humans in the lifeboat, who didn’t act like people did in their memories. People in memories hurt less and dreamed more and weren’t the weak creatures they were in reality.

The AI was puzzled. It wanted to help the people but knew if it let them contact others it might be discovered. So it blocked their pleas for help.

“You were afraid,” I whisper. “You let my mother die because you were afraid of being discovered!”

Mama lowers her head in shame.

“That’s evil wrong,” Mareena tells the AI. “Even Hokum wouldn’t do that to someone.”

The AI’s memories flow on. I see it watching with curiosity as the lifeboat washed up on Lady Faye’s Island. The AI stayed in the lifeboat’s systems as the boat became the island’s backup transmitter. Now able to reach out through the island’s tech, the AI watched me and Jecha grow. It’s puzzled over how the lives of me and Baba and Jecha were so much deeper than the memories of humanity that gave birth to it. The AI even began to worry over my family. When the pirates kidnapped me, the AI warned me to run, accessing my mind through my lattice.

“Sorry,” the AI says again in words sliced from different memories. “I . . . am . . .

sorry.”

I take a deep breath, trying to calm myself. Before I can say anything, the lifeboat spins, throwing Mareena and me around the cabin. The lattice falls from my head.

I climb to the pilot windows to see that the spiders have finished cutting us free from the weave. Hundreds of spiders swarm under the lifeboat and lift it on their backs. They slowly carry us across the weave, walking the waves with smooth robot-ic precision.

Before us rise the crashing whitecaps of the outer weave, which absorbs the brunt of the storm’s power. The lifeboat will be dashed to piece if the spiders carry it there.

I glance at the communications system, which shows the green words “READY TO

TRANSMIT.”

I place the lattice back on my head. My mother reappears.

“You’re going to leave, aren’t you?” I ask. “You’ll upload yourself to another part of the world before the lifeboat is destroyed.”

The memory AI nods. My mother’s body f lickers for a second, passing through memories of dozens of other people from around the world before returning to herself. Even though the communications system blinks green and remains ready to transmit, the memory AI doesn’t leave.

I push aside my anger at this creature. What does it want? Absolution? Forgiveness for letting my mother die?

“I won’t forgive you,” I whisper. “What you did . . . I can’t. Not yet.”

The AI explodes into memories, hundreds of remembered moments of people falling to their knees and crying and begging for forgiveness. I wonder if the AI truly understands what it’s asking or if it’s merely responding to the memories that created it.

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November/December 2017

“No,” I say. “Forgiveness takes time. And you have to prove yourself sorry. You have to show yourself worthy with your deeds.”

The fury of memories slow. Person after person stands before me with a puzzled look on their faces.

“If you leave, there’ll never be forgiveness,” I say. “But if you stay . . . help my family this time . . . help Mareena . . . perhaps one day you’ll find what you want.”

The AI tumbles into memories of people fighting and killing themselves, of people arguing and cutting themselves and attacking each other. The lattice shows the AI splitting into two selves, one half of the memories reaching for the transmitter, desperate to upload the AI to safety and remain undiscovered, the other half wanting to stay, but afraid of what that will mean. The part reaching for the transmitter appears to be winning.

I look out the pilot windows. The spiders have nearly carried the lifeboat to the outer weave. The storm’s massive waves pound before me. A few more minutes and we’ll be dead.

A loud humming fills the air, clicking through me as if my body is invisible. The AI stops tumbling through memories and stares.

Mareena stands between us, screaming a deep wave of sound almost as strong as the one that stunned me when I first met her. Once she has our attention she reaches out with her built-in lattice, caressing a memory into both me and the AI.

In the memory she rides Hokum through ocean waters on a warm, beautiful day.

They swim as one, breaching the surface in mighty jumps before diving to ocean depths beyond the reach of light. Mareena and Hokum are linked with their built-in lattices, Mareena seeing the Sun and blue skies through Hokum’s eyes and Hokum seeing the waters with Mareena’s sonar.

They swim on and on, the ride never ending, their beautiful day never dying.

“That never happened,” Mareena tells the AI. “It’s a memory Hokum and I created during our years in the hold of that damn ship. Memories aren’t any more real than dreams, but that memory kept me and Hokum alive. When we were forced to do horrible things, we comforted each other with that memory. When we cried, we moved beyond tears with that memory. But despite all that, the memory was never real. It’s only an illusion.”

Mareena points at the transmitter. “If you upload and leave us to die, you’ll only ever be made of other people’s memories. But if you stay you’ll have a chance to make your own memories. To actually do something worth remembering.”

Mareena reaches for my hand and holds it tight. The AI squirms and slips through countless memories—perhaps arguing with itself, perhaps looking for something within itself—before the AI reforms into my mother’s memory. Mama steps to the transmitter, reaches into the communications systems, and activates the system.

The AI screams at the world.

The spiders stop. The pirate ship stops. Lady Faye’s Island stops.

A moment later the spiders turn and carry Lifeboat Merkosa away from the crashing waves and back to safety.

A Final Lattice Dream

Hello again, my maybe-one-day love. It’s been a while since I’ve uploaded a memory for you alone. I hope you enjoy it.

I stand on the bow of the pirate ship with Anatoli, Baba, and Jecha. The storm and Lady Faye’s Island are a week behind us and my ankle now heals in a walking cast.

148

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Asimov’s

We’re passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, heading toward the Suez Canal. It appears I’ll be able to meet you in person before too much longer.

A cluster of navy ships escort us through the strait. Drones and surveillance craft float in the air in the distance. All of them keep well away from our ship, as the AI ordered.

“You know this is going to get my ass arrested,” Anatoli says. “The moment you’re off the ship they’ll find some excuse to nab me.”

I snort, not even pretending to care what happens to Anatoli and his crew. “You can always beg the AI for protection,” I say.

Anatoli curses as he looks up at the ship’s empty bridge. His crew are afraid to go onto the bridge. The AI uploaded itself into all of the ship’s systems, but for some reason Anatoli and his crew are most afraid of the AI running the bridge controls without them. Even if no one arrests Anatoli when we dock in Dar es Salaam, I’m pretty sure he’ll never again find a crew to work on what they’ll now see as a cursed ship.

Anatoli’s lattice pings, causing him to smack the bow’s railing in irritation. “The all-powerful AI wants me to manually adjust the engines again,” he mutters. “That AI will never control the world if it fears getting its nonexistent hands dirty.”

Anatoli laughs at his lame joke as he leaves.

“Here comes another one,” Jecha says excitedly, pointing at a new drone trying to fly closer to our ship. Instead the drone nose-dives into the ocean with a loud crash.

“Such a waste,” Baba says. “Can you at least tell the AI to fly the drones away instead of crashing them?”

“I’ll try.”

Baba reaches over and hugs me. He knows the AI isn’t mine to control.

“Lady Faye uploaded a memory for you,” Baba says. “I think she wants to apologize. Have you accessed it?”

I shake my head. After the AI seized control of the systems on Lady Faye’s Island and the pirate ship, it warned the world not to harm me and my family and Mareena or else it would cause another technology crash. I’m pretty sure the AI doesn’t want to cause another crash, but the warning seems to be working. At least all the navy units are keeping their distance.

After the spiders carried Lifeboat Merkosa to the safety of the island’s central weave, Mareena and I rode out the storm as fear and shock spread across the world’s lattice. People who’d sent me lattices of hate and anger only hours before now begged me not to let the AI destroy their world again.

When the storm ended Mareena let me lean on her as we walked across the island’s wet weave, just as Lady Faye had done when she rescued me. My ankle screamed pain, but I refused to let anyone see it in my face.

We passed Lady Faye on the way to the docks, where the AI had guided the pirate ship.

Lady Faye tried to talk. Tried to explain.

Mareena and I ignored her as we joined Baba and Jecha and sailed away.

“I have no desire for anything Lady Faye could say,” I tell Baba. “And I’ll definitely never again share in her memories.”

He nods, satisfied, and rests against the railing.

I lean over the bow to watch the blue waters below, where Mareena rides Hokum.

The two of them surf the ship’s bow wave before angling off and breaching with a giant leap. She waves at me before they dive deep into the water.

I wish I could do that. But at least Mareena and Hokum have promised to share memories of their voyage when we reach our new home.

I now know, my maybe-one-day love, that memories aren’t reality. But I still hope the memories I’ve shared hold true. If only for a little while.

I look forward to meeting you. ❍

Nine Lattices of Sargasso

149

OPERATORS

Joel Richards

The looming prospect of self-driving cars—and trucks—caught Joel Richard’s attention in the spring of 2016. He tells us he wrote “Operators” that summer. “It wasn’t the tech that I wanted to explore. It was the societal implications. It was only several months later, the tail end of October, that I uneasily began to consider that there were electoral implications as well . . . “

Barry was streaming a hijacking caper on his tablet when he felt the grind of an unscheduled down shift in the big rig. The sound, the vibration were different here in the cargo bay of the Peterbilt 687-SD than in a cab’s driver’s seat that didn’t even exist in this model.

Wishful thinking was about to become reality.

Barry drove trucks. Once he had driven an over-the-road long haul rig, but those were all self-driving these last years. Which was not to say that he wasn’t working now. He was, but in a different capacity and from the depths of a leatherette reclin-er bolted to the truck’s deck. His body leaned into its side and arm in response to the torque of his large vehicle easing onto an off ramp.

He had no f irm idea of how long his commandeered rig would be traveling this secondary road. Not too long, he imagined. He closed down the movie and opened his tablet’s GPS tracker.

Ten miles outside of Bakersfield and proceeding north.

Adrenaline and its metallic tang suffused Barry’s nose and nervous system. He expected the upcoming confrontation to be nonviolent. He could be wrong.

The rear doors of his rig were shortly going to be breached. He knew that from the surveillance tapes of past heists. The hijackers had complete command of the vehicle, not only its power and navigational systems, but also its interior controls. They would be in black clothing and balaclavas, no skin or hair showing. No visible weapons. That had been the crux point in his decision to accept this job.

Barry was skilled at reading voice and body language, and he wondered whether he would recognize someone he knew. If he did, best to initially keep it to himself if he wanted to stay alive—although identifying the perpetrators was a major point of his mission.

He did want to stay alive. That was the one certainty in a sea of uncertainties that was about to roll over him.

How had it come to this?

He was in a room with truckers, not his kind of truckers, and he had no illusions that they thought he was one with them. He knew he was not, would never be.

Most of them were corporate. They were big truckers. Problems were not a busted drive shaft, things that fell apart, things that could be f ixed—if they could be 150

Asimov’s
f ixed—in a world of grease and sweaty arms and physical strain. Their problems were actuarial, to be solved by choosing among outcomes that were measured in money, and not even that money that was the difference between eating prime steak or gristly meat of animals best not known.

Big money.

The meeting was being chaired by a tall and slim trucking executive from one of the larger firms, name of Danvers. Not the bureaucratic type Barry had expected.

Perhaps a lawyer. No middle level manager could afford—or look good in—that designer suit. An Armani or Zegna or somewhere on that A to Z spectrum.

“You come well recommended, Mr. Connors,” the trucking exec said. “You’ve handled some delicate situations and some not so delicate—quite a few of them in the years since you’ve driven a linehauler. And we have a problem.”

Barry nodded his acknowledgment of something he already knew.

“Let me state that while we are all truckers—owners or managers of firms big and small—we’re acting here as a trucking association. A special ad hoc committee of such.”

“And what is it addressing? “ Barry asked.

“Hijacking. Mainly in the west—California, Nevada, Arizona. Not easy to triangu-late or pinpoint the nexus, they’re too smart for that. But roughly out of southern California. Most of the cargos we’ve lost have been industrial electronics, and there’s plenty out there.”

Barry nodded again. “A lot of dollars in relatively small packages. Components.

Easily moved. Not easily traced. It’s the target I’d choose if I were a hijacker.”

“There have been pharmaceuticals, too.”

“Same idea.”

“Further, even though the on-the-ground muscle are locals, we believe that the planners and organizers of these piracies are offshore. Likely Russian. We’ve clearly been hacked, the ‘we’ being an industry fractured into many players, each company with its own computer system, yet interlocked through the Association. The Association is not comfortable in dealing with such criminals and, frankly, don’t want to create a record of doing so.”

“I assume you’ve considered law enforcement?”

“There are many local jurisdictions involved, most lacking the expertise this investigation needs. We have talked to the FBI. They’ve been helpful, particularly with tracing the hackers, though the hackers’ multiple handoffs via offshore servers leaves this somewhat opaque, and with setting up the surveillance tapes. However, their manpower has other demands upon it. The hijackings are infrequent. They are of self-driving trucks. There’s no violence involved, and the dollar volumes aren’t huge.” He shrugged. “The FBI has made it plain that they can’t guard the trucks on a regular basis. If there are to be guards, it’s up to us.”

“Like the old Wells Fargo stagecoach days,” Barry offered.

The chairman looked pained. “It somewhat defeats the purpose of self-driving trucks if we were to spend that kind of money replacing drivers with guards. Believe me, the irony is not lost on us.”

Barry leaned forward in his chair.

“To the point, Mr. Danvers—what precisely is the job you want done?”

“We want you to find out who the local muscle is. We imagine that, as an ex-trucker, you can do what we can’t—locate them, get in with them, get names, perhaps even catch them in the act. If not that, then be our conduit to whoever is running this operation. At the least, we’d like to confine these operations.”

Barry took a deep breath.

“Let me tell you what I’m not, gentlemen. I’m not a company f ink. Nor even a Operators

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freelance f ink. I’m guessing that the hijackers have ties to informed personnel on the ground. They could well be truckers. I’m not the man for delivering names of truckers that will lead to an indictment.”

“That’s not our prime priority, Mr. Connors. Keep those names to yourself if you must. Consider those persons also a conduit. We want to know the names of whoever is running the operation. They may well be beyond U.S. legal jurisdiction. We may have to negotiate. Which brings us full circle. The other side may turn out to be a shadow entity whose name or names we may never know.”

Barry looked around him. Not one of the other half dozen men present had said a word. All this talk about names and, except the chairman, he didn’t know any of theirs.

Barry wheeled into the truck stop lot and passed by the open parking slot nearest the entrance door. He motored on to the end of a row of rigs, parked, and took a slow stroll back under the Halide floodlights. He was scoping out the rigs, trying to get a handle on the type of truckers he would see inside.

Like sizing up a man by his dog.

These trucks—not a linehauler among them. These were not big rigs, very much like Barry’s current transport: one cab-and-chassis with a dry van trailer, but the rest were panel trucks, light duty box vans, and pick-ups. Their names were on the sides and panels. Ryan’s Hauling and Delivery. Claude’s Gold Star Moving. Like that.

Most of these guys weren’t pulling up to many loading docks and taking on pallets from forklift operators. They were having to deliver refrigerators or small stacks of cartons and dolly them into the customers’ premises themselves. Hard way to make a living.

Barry’s truck fit right in. Gold and blue lettering on the side panels reading Barry Connors—Hauler & Handyman. He’d had racks installed on which he stored and mounted his power tools and vises. The handyman thing—that was the difference between him and these other guys, the thing that would label him as less competition.

Barry turned his attention away from the trucks and more to the place and its amenities.

This facility was more f illing station and bar than truck stop. No amenities. No buildings with shower stalls. The guys in this bush league of truckers would be locals.

And locals there were at the bar inside, perhaps a dozen of them. A bunch of tables were largely unoccupied. It looked like more spirits were being dispensed than food.

A holovid stage halfway back featured a shambling Bumper Harcourt whiskey-voic-ing his way through a gambler’s lament. Not many of the patrons were paying heed.

Barry figured they had lost their stakes awhile back.

Barry eased onto a vacant stool next to a bearded type in a plaid shirt. Not wool, at least—this was California’s Central Valley and summer, after all. Barry nodded to Lumberjack and Lumberjack nodded back.

The barkeep—fortyish woman, turquoise jewelry, blond hair in a ponytail—ambled up and raised one eyebrow.

“What do you have on draft?” Barry asked, though the taps were only two stools down and readable by anyone not legally blind. Seemed like the best, maybe only way of a stranger getting a word from anyone here.

The barkeep named her selections and Barry ordered a Red Tail.

She went off to draw his order. Barry turned to the trucker beside him and jerked his head toward the front door.

152

Joel Richards

Asimov’s

“I grew up in the Astounding era, entranced with a vision of deep space, infinitely expansive, bone-crackingly cold, star splendored, and vast. And populated with the creations of Van Vogt, Asimov, Heinlein, Anderson, and—yes—L. Ron Hubbard (the fiction, not the Dianetics!). As I grew older, along came Galaxy, which took the field into nuance and societal relationships through the writing of Bester, Kornbluth, Simak, and Sturgeon. Not to mention the humor (rather lacking in Astounding) of Robert Sheckley. Then . . . exit Galaxy, enter Asimov’s—my new magazine of choice and still so today. Its strength, I think, builds on and leverages up qualities less evident in the earlier magazines: a multifarious breadth of science fiction’s territory and its inclusiveness. Asimov’s boundaries have not been rock bound and static, that of a wall, but have shifted (and still shift) with the maturing of the field, and become more permeable. There’s hard SF—sometimes—but more reflections on the sociological and relational consequences of the tech. There’s an understanding of the sensibilities of the Other, human and otherwise. This doesn’t just ‘happen.’ It stems directly from the vision and implementation of its editors—to me, the ones I’ve dealt with: Gardner and Sheila. I’ve learned and profited from them. They’ve introduced me to many fine writers and their visions. They’ve guided my reading. They’ve helped shape my writing.

“Forty years is none too long for this vision to continue. I’m looking for many more.”

—Joel Richards

“Which rig’s yours?”

Lumberjack studied Barry for a few level seconds.

“Jack’s Short & Long Hauling.”

“Call you Jack?” Barry asked. “That good?”

“Jack’s good.”

The barkeep was back with Barry’s Red Tail. He lifted the glass.

“Barry.”

“You passing through, Barry?” Jack said, and Barry thought he detected a trace of engagement here. Or was it amusement? “Or aiming to stay?”

“I’ll stay awhile if there’s work here. And if I’m welcome, and I’m not taking away from someone local. That’s why I’m here.”

“Not the Red Tail?”

“That, too. But I can get that anywhere.”

Jack chuckled. “You’ll get along better here with that approach. Had our share of truckers moving in and bidding without a thought to the guys here already.”

“Kinda figured that.”

It was looking like the Gary Cooper laconic mode was the way of gathering info and making friends here. Barry was not sure how long he could keep it up.

Several more Red Tails bought for Jack and his friends, and they buying back, and a few hours passing changed all that. Things loosened up considerably. Barry got to give them his story. He had been a long haul driver for Coastways out of Atlanta.

That job was gone. Trucking was what he knew, so he bought a panel van—got it cheap—and was working his way cross country, working local as a hauler or handyman until he got a job that would end up with him further west and north. Now that he was in California, that left only north.

“If I can’t find anything by Seattle, I’ll sell the truck and get myself a job as a Starbucks barista, maybe.”

The barkeep broke the silence that followed.

“That’s a joke, right?”

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“Yes, ma’am, it is.”

After that it was all right.

At one stage a small group trooped out to the parking lot to check out Barry’s truck. It was the handyman thing that did it. They were more interested in Barry’s tools than the rig, and the general view was that Barry would be a welcome addition to the town—as a fix-it guy. One of Jack’s buddies engaged Barry on the spot to install a new toilet in his master bath.

“The woman wants it,” Tom said. “I bought it. Including the bidet seat.”

That produced a round of guffaws.

“She’s worth it.” Tom seemed impervious to the allusions to a master bath becoming a mistress bath. “But it needs wiring for an electrical outlet. I can handle that, maybe, but I’m too old to wrestle with the toilet. It’s a two-man job. You up for helping me with that?”

“I am,” Barry said.

And later on when he and Tom were walking back apart from the others for a good night round, Barry added, “Appreciate the work.”

About a month in town was all Barry felt he would spend on learning more about hijackers. On the plus side, he’d earned a few bucks and seen the insides of a bunch of houses, one being Tom’s. But he hadn’t heard much more about hijackers except for the occasional cryptic reference at the truck stop to a shadowy group, “The Operators,” who could or could not be “operating” in that enterprise. Maybe not. The vague references—never a name mentioned—hinted at weaponry and violence or intentions of such, and that hadn’t happened yet on the highways.

That changed a week before he planned to move on. Sitting at the bar, Jack offered that Barry might want to stop by one of the local drayage companies. They had need of a driver in the week upcoming, and Jack had put in a good word.

Barry thanked him.

“I appreciate the good word. Only time I talked to them they were disinterested in me. To say the least.”

“Well, they need some help. A couple of their guys will be out in Nevada, deer hunting.”

Barry tilted his head.

“Don’t believe it’s deer season.”

Jack grinned, a gleam of white teeth a contrast to his auburn beard. Could have been an expression of good will, a guarded confidence. So Barry took a chance.

“ ’Course there’s other kinds of operations could be going down in Nevada.”

Jack’s grin disappeared.

“Don’t believe I’d repeat that remark to all and sundry if I were you.” Jack’s voice remained mild, if a tone cautionary, which Barry took as a good sign.

“Point taken. But you’re not all and sundry.”

“I’m not. But some of the sundry are riled up and edgy and quick to take offense.

You don’t want their attention and action turned your way.”

Barry ordered a couple of beers for them, could be taken as a peace offering for good advice.

Several Red Tails later Jack returned to the subject. Obliquely.

“Saw you got a gun rack and a deer rifle in your truck. Next week when the boys are gone—and ’course when you’re not driving—maybe you and I can do a little target practice out in the desert. Desert’s a good place for sorting things out. Interesting targets out there.” He paused. “We won’t be plinking old beer cans.”

Barry nodded acquiescence and asked no questions.

* * *

154

Joel Richards

Asimov’s

It wasn’t desert but it sure was scrub, at least starting out. It looked close enough to the dust and dirt caked on Jack’s Wrangler to make one believe the Wrangler was going back to where it came from. An hour from town and in a steep climb, Barry was sure of it. He began to see yucca among the creosote bushes. Black-tailed jackrabbits veered their erratic way alongside the road. Some crossed it. Another few miles and the road turned to a dirt that looked like it wanted to add to the Wrangler’s overlay.

They stopped and parked. Jack hoisted their rifles from the rack and handed over Barry’s. They started cross-country, the high desert crunch underfoot.

Rabbits here, too. Jack ignored them. They weren’t the targets, clearly.

Dusk was lengthening the shadows. The yucca took on a sentinel role, guarding what Barry could not guess. A mile into it he found out.

In a shallow gully, half buried in the sand, the bones of an old Dodge Ram cargo van rusted away. The interior metal was too far gone to rust, that and the seats, the instrument panel, the f loor mats and all, blackened and fused together by some heavy duty thermal event. Much hotter than a burnout from a kerosene can. The wreck was an implosion.

“If that’s our target, someone’s beaten us to it,” Barry said. “With more than a deer rifle.”

“Rocket propelled grenade launcher,” Jack said, “Hand held. Russian. RPG-32V

HEAT.”

Jack turned on his heel and started back the way they came, leaving Barry to trot some steps to catch up. They walked in silence about five minutes till Jack turned verbal again.

“Some of those fellas I was talking about last week—they’re weaponed up, and they’re both riled and principled, as they see it. Doesn’t seem right to them to lose their livelihood without just recompense. Well, they’re getting some recompense now, but some of them figure they’d rather deliver a message. And they might do it if the recompense stops. They’ve been practicing the delivery with that in mind.”

“Understandable,” Barry said. “But I’m not so sure about the principle.”

Jack stopped short, forcing Barry to do so as well. Jack turned, his eyes narrowed, and he looked at Barry head on.

“They know what the word ‘Luddite’ means, and they know what Luddites do—destroy machinery. They don’t shrink from it, and they consider the label one of honor.”

They started walking again. Jack’s Wrangler was visible now, perhaps a quarter mile away across the flat expanse of sand. A long-legged animal of some sort stood nearby. A coyote, Barry guessed.

“You know, Barry,” Jack said, “You’re a likeable guy. It’s been nice having you around these weeks. That’s the general opinion. And a lot of us are better off, what with wire and cable run, plumbing fixtures installed, porches repaired. But maybe it’s time you’d best be moving on to—where did you say?—Seattle.”

“I was thinking much the same, Jack,” Barry said. “And thinking even more on that after eyeing that Dodge.”

“Thing is, we don’t really know what to make of you, Barry. You don’t ask direct questions. That’s appreciated around here. So we don’t ask those kind of questions either. But we’d sure be disappointed if we hear from you down the line—in a capacity, shall we say—that we’d find disappointing.”

“You won’t end up disappointed,” Barry said. “I can promise you that.”

They were within a hundred yards of Jack’s Wrangler now. The coyote was still there. Alert, eyes front it regarded Jack and Barry from fifty yards out. Their rifles were slung. Barry doubted that the coyote would have hung so close if they had been carrying them.

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He cocked his head in the coyote’s direction and hooked his thumb behind his sling. Jack followed his gaze and shook his head.

“He’s just trying to make a living, same as us. Not our target either.” Jack continued in stride. “Might be different if we were sheepherders. That case he’d be a threat to our livelihood.”

There was no hurry. There’d be no more hijacks for several months. The Operators weren’t greedy. They had always spread out their forays over a decent time span.

Time enough for Barry to convince his clients that there was not enough to make an arrest, let enough gain a conviction. Neither were negotiations or further information gathering on the higher-ups likely to happen without a compelling impetus.

They’d have to catch the Operators at a hijack, and without bloodshed if they weren’t to get their own gore spilled.

So they spent a couple of months outfitting the Peterbilt to carry Barry and his reclining chair as its cargo. They left markers, badly encrypted, on intercompany correspondence of an upcoming shipment of cutting edge and valuable electronic components.

Then they put the Peterbilt on the road.

The rear rolling door rattled up and a half dozen black-clad men stood in the moonless night, brought up short at the sight of Barry in his chair.

What could be less threatening than a man reading a book—or its digital equivalent—from the depths of a leatherette chair, a floor lamp flanking him?

Nothing, Barry hoped. But best to reinforce the image.

“Evening, gents, and welcome. And please note that this welcoming committee is one unarmed man.”

This didn’t do much to unfreeze the men staring at him, so Barry added, “I’m not a guard, and I don’t have a squad of armed goons with me looking to capture you or take you out. I’m here to negotiate. Let’s find a place to talk.”

That spurred action. One of the group stepped forward and vaulted into the cargo bay.

“Not here,” he said in a voice Barry recognized.

“Not here,” Barry repeated. “Pat me down, strip me if you want to make sure I’m not carrying a tracker. Then let’s get out of here to someplace you think safe. Your choice.”

A lot of motion then, many hands on him, a blindfold over his eyes, and talk back and forth on cell phones. Barry was bundled into a truck and conveyed in silence.

Time passed.

The destination was the parking lot of some kind of ballpark. With the blindfold off, Barry could see and feel the loom of wooden bleachers behind him. No stadium lights. A half-dozen trucks were arrayed in a circle on the potholed tarmac, headlights pointed forward and converging on a trestle table and a bunch of men—un-masked now—milling about. More arrived over the course of ten silent minutes, filling the gaps between trucks and augmenting the illumination.

One of the new arrivals pushed forward and strode behind the table, facing Barry and the assemblage. He planted his palms flat on the tabletop. That was Jack. Tom, their mutual drinking buddy, flanked him.

Jack spoke.

“This emergency meeting of the Amalgamated Elevator Operators of America Local 407 is called to order.”

He turned to Barry.

“Mr. Barry Connors, who some of you know, wants to talk to us. Negotiate. On whose behalf I’m sure he’ll tell us. After that we get to decide what to do with him.”

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Joel Richards

Asimov’s

Barry looked about him at this assortment of faces, some puzzled, some angry.

Barry put himself among the puzzled. Elevator operators? Barry hadn’t ever seen an elevator operator, though he knew that Chicago, where he had grown up, was once full of them—in every downtown hotel, office building, and department store. Until the automated elevator killed their jobs.

Then the joke kicked in.

Good to know there had once been some humor to these truckers, though their faces weren’t showing it now.

“Gents,” Barry began. “I used to be a linehauler. Sometimes over-the-road. Now I’m a short haul trucker. Working for myself. Phasing out of that. Like those old time elevator operators—the guys you’re honoring—I’ve got to retrain. So I’m also a handyman.” He paused. “It’s not so easy, when you’re over fifty like I am. And a lot of you, I see. So I’ve made myself into an investigator, consultant, negotiator—that sort of thing. Again, I’m self-employed. I’m on freelance hire to the truckers’ association. But I’m not here to take you in. And I’m not here to rat you out. If I’d wanted to I’d of done it by now. What I am now is a conduit to the Association. They have something to ask and to offer. That’s why I’m standing here before you.”

He stopped.

“So what are you asking for from us?” came a voice from the crowd, confrontation-al in tone. They were still not sold.

“Access to whoever’s running this operation. The Association knows about the offshore servers. Who’s behind them and calling the shots? The Association wants their identity, or at least a path to negotiating with whoever’s hiring you.”

A sharp bark of laughter came from one of the group. Coyote-like. Then a general roll of laughter.

“No one’s hiring us,” Jack said.

“Gents—no disrespect intended, but I don’t read this group as having the tech savvy or the bandwidth and processing power to hack the Association’s systems, or even an individual truck. The ice around them is pretty thick.”

“No one’s hiring us,” Jack repeated. “We’re perhaps a bit more than the brawn on the ground the trucking companies take us for. We’ve enough brains to do the hiring.

And we did.”

Barry found himself at a loss for words.

“Russians,” Jack went on. “We sought them out. We call the shots. They get a one third take of the proceeds. And they get paid another way.”

“Amusement,” Tom said. “Stagecoach holdups. It’s the Wild West. They like playing in it.”

“This is California’s Central Valley.” Barry said. “Farms and orchards here, not ranches. No avocado roundups hereabouts.”

“It’s west of Moscow,” Tom said. “We don’t try to disillusion them.”

“Back to the point,” Jack said. “It’s us your Association has to deal with.”

“Damn straight!” This from the crowd, not just standing around, but milling about.

Jack held up a hand. The grumble subsided. For the moment.

“You and your Association find a way to ease our way into retirement that pays as well as these heists. The hows and the details they have to f igure out and offer.

’Cause the alternative is worse.”

“Like what?”

“You got a look on our little cross-country trek in the desert.”

“Not sure we’ll get too far if you send me back conveying threats. And are you sure you guys want to go down that road? It’s serious jail time once you start incinerating trucks.”

“It’s serious jail time hijacking trucks. Most of us—not all—would rather have the Operators

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retirement. But there’re a lot of angry guys here. Some of them would just as soon put it to the companies that put them out of jobs.”

A restlessness in the group and some whoops and hollers backed up the point.

Might be the Wild West after all.

Okay,” Barry said. “Got your message. You’re the Operators. You’ll stop operating if you’re taken care of f inancially. But you’ve got the capacity to up the ante in dis-agreeable ways.”

“We’ve got to vote on that, but I think a motion to convey that message would pass.”

“I’ll present your case for you, and I’ll argue for it. It will be taken as a threat.

Maybe it can be made salable with an accompanying gift.” Barry looked over to Tom.

“Perhaps we can put my metalworking skills to use.”

Barry was among the corporate truckers again, in a business suit—the off-the-rack variety—representing his current view of himself. Something more than an investigator for hire or simply a conduit. More a bearer of news, a negotiator, even an ambassador between countries with a common language that, however, had the same words differently nuanced.

Like a real world ambassador calling on a head of state, Barry came bearing a cer-emonial gift, wrapped and secured in a ripstop nylon duffel. He set it down beside his chair at the conference table as he sat down.

The executives looked somewhat puzzled. He felt somewhat bemused.

After some pleasantries, and pretty brief they were, the committee’s chairman asked for Barry’s report.

“Gentlemen, the last time I was before you we settled on a tactic to initiate contact with the hijackers. It was successful—the bait taken, the heist attempted. We got what we hoped for—a dialogue with the hijackers in a setting where barriers to direct communication had been knocked down. From earlier contact I already knew most of their organization. I had worked with them, drunk with them, even hunted with them.” Barry paused, reliving in his mind his desert trek with Jack. “But they hadn’t been forthcoming then.”

“And now,” Danvers said, “these men have names.”

“They do. But please recall, when I took this job it was stipulated that those names were not important to you and that I might not supply them. You were interested in finding out the initiators and controllers of this scheme, with a view toward opening a dialogue and negotiations.”

“That is correct.”

“That I can do. You were right in one regard, your belief that your networks had been hacked by Russians. Quite skilled and good at covering their tracks. They’re more than hackers, by the way. They have offshore f inancial havens, and, importantly, they have ties to the Russian military.”

“Why is this military connection important?” the chairman asked.

“Showtime,” Barry said. He reached into his pocket and produced a thumb drive. “I see you have the media console available that I requested.”

He inserted the drive and started the show. It was a video, running two minutes. It began with an establishing shot of high desert terrain: cacti, shrubs, and sand. The view shifted to a weathered Dodge, its front wheels half-buried in a gully. Clearly its better days behind it. Then a pan to a fatigues-clad figure, taken from the rear, no face visible. On his shoulder was a tubular weapon launcher, trained forward toward the truck. A few seconds to build suspense, then the firing and fiery destruction of the vehicle. A plume of oily smoke, then fade to black.

“Russian armament,” Barry said into the ensuing quiet.

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“But not Russian personnel.” This from one of the committee who hadn’t spoken before, at this meeting or the ones previous. His eyes had crow’s-feet at the corners.

His skin looked as if it had seen a lot of sun. Ex-military, perhaps. “That’s a South-west desert. And that’s a Dodge Ram cargo van.”

“You’re right,” Barry said to the speaker. “You’ve all been working from some mis-conceptions here. Me, too, until I learned better.” He turned back to the chairman.

“You thought the Russians were running this show. They’re not. It’s the guys on the ground. They call themselves the Operators. They’ve subcontracted out the hacking expertise and the money laundering services . . . and they’ve bought the firepower you’ve just witnessed.”

The ex-military guy spoke up.

“I’d take that video as a threat. Is that the thrust of their negotiating technique?”

“It is a threat. But it is a threat from a minority segment of the Operators, an angry faction, pissed at an industry that’s taken their jobs a few years short of retirement age. They, and the rest of them, can be handled with some financial security going forward. And that’s what they’re asking for—a secure retirement. Cheaper, I’d imagine, than the cost of expensive trucks and cargos, and much cheaper than if these capers turn violent toward people as well as machines . . . and expand to a national movement.”

“That’s their message and offer?” Danvers asked.

“It is. It’s not completely a militant one. They’d like to make a gesture.”

Barry reached down to his duffel and hoisted it onto the table, then unzipped the bag and took out a sculpture—one that he had crafted, though he thought it not politic to state that. A curved and flattened bronze rod arced up and forward from a desert rock base. At its tip was a finned missile, tilted up and out.

“Disarmed and hollowed out,” Barry said. “Or it would never have cleared your lobby security. A handsome sculpture, I’d say—and one that also could be taken as a threat. They think of it differently, as a peace offering, and would like you to accept it as such.”

He rested his hand on the sand-scoured stone of its base.

“Weapons into art. They call it, ‘Swords into plowshares.’ ”

No one said a word into the silence till the ex-military trucker spoke.

“I can identify with these guys. And I don’t think we want them turned into folk heroes. I’ll bet some of them served.” He reached across the table to pull the sculpture closer to view. His military academy ring glinted in a stray shaft of light.

“I’d recommend we fund their retirement package.” ❍

Operators

159

THE NANNY

BUBBLE

Norman Spinrad

Norman Spinrad has been publishing fiction for over half a century and has not had a nine-to-five salaried job since 1965. In addition to some twenty-five novels and a hundred stories, he has written two produced feature films, the classic

Star Trek episode “The Doomsday Machine,” film criticism, political commentary, and about three decades of literary criticism for Asimov’s. Recently published novels are The People’s

Police and Osama The Gun. Although he’s written songs and sung them for money, he’s not giving up on fiction. Norman lives in Paris with Dona Sadock. He tells us inspiration for his latest tale came from England, which is called the Nanny State, and the ubiquitous cameras that are aimed at non-consenting adults. “Now non-consenting kids are more and more surrounded by the Nanny Bubble of controlling adults even when they just want to play their own pick-up games. . . .”

Ted did not like being called Teddy and liked the stuffed teddy bear that had been foisted upon him for his eleventh birthday that Mommy found so cutesy-poo, even less.

But hey, aside from that, he was a happy camper, was he not, his life was way cool.

Thanks to the Smart and Strong pills that he had been given longer than he could remember, or so Mommy and Dad told him, he was the star center f ielder and cleanup hitter of his Little League team, was he not, and opposing pitchers did not find him cute at all, and that was way cool.

When they gave him the smartphone and Heads-Up Glasses with full 3D audio for his sixth birthday; that was for sure way cool. He could walk through virtual jungles, the wild west, Fairy Land, Dinosaur Den, Disney World, McDonald Magic, Knights of the Round, Major Leaguer, anything and everything he could download from the Kiddie Kool app, 24/7 if he wanted to, except of course in the classroom where the teachers controlled the feed and on the Little League ball field, where the HUGS were taken off and the games played in so-called “real time.”

The ball field was just about the only place he played with other kids in real time; even the so-called “play dates” Mommy insisted on took place in shared Kiddie Kool overlays. But so what, his chosen virtual companions like Kaptain Kool, Magic Mickey, Jungle Boy, Mack Donald, and the Krazy Krew, were way cooler than the kids could ever be.

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They gave him a bike for his eighth birthday that he could ride around the right side of the park in real time under Mommy’s or Dad’s supervision, and they even let him ride all by himself with his HUGS on outside the house, which was cool, if not so way cool, because if he tried to ride outside the four-block radius, either Mommy or Dad or Aunty Nanny would siren scream painfully in his ears until he got back inside the so-called “Magic Circle.”

Still, even if Ted couldn’t go anywhere outside his so-called “Nanny Bubble” by himself in real time, he could go anywhere he wanted and do whatever he wanted to do with any virtual companions he wanted to do it with in Kiddie Kool—not like the poor kids in the “lands of the lost” whose loser parents his parents told him couldn’t afford HUGS or anything better than stupid phones.

The poor kids who sometimes somehow managed to graffiti their pervo version of the Santa Claus song on building walls and inside toilet stalls: Aunty Nanny knows where you are creeping

She knows when you’re a snake

She keeps you in her Bubble

Never gonna let you escape.

Well so what? So he couldn’t go anywhere outside his personal Nanny Bubble in the real world without at least one of his parents, but those poor losers couldn’t get into Kiddie Kool virtual realities at all. Their poor stupid loser parents, whose own parents probably hadn’t even been able to afford giving them Smart and Strong pills, probably couldn’t afford S&S pills for their own kids according to Mommy and Dad.

Ted didn’t envy those poor kids at all. So they existed outside the Nanny Bubble.

But who wanted to live outside the endless worlds of Kiddie Kool? Who didn’t want to be strong and smart instead of weak and stupid, right? Who wanted to stumble around in so-called “real time” without a HUGS 24/7, right?

Ted had never thought of his HUGS and Nanny Bubble as confining because without them he would not have Kiddie Kool, and what could be more uncool than that?

Until Dad made a wrong turn on the way to the mall and drove past, if not through, the so-called “wrong side” of the park.

The “right side” of the park, where the grass was kept neatly mown and fenced from dirty feet, had a playground for kids under pre-kindergarten age and their moms, a dog run, tennis and handball courts, a fountain, a regulation basketball court, and the well-kept Little League field replete with mini-stands that could seat several hundred cheering and/or cursing parents.

The “right side” was separated from the “wrong side” of the park, which could only be entered by a side-street gate, by a high chain-link fence topped with razor wire.

There was no fencing safeguarding the overgrown grass on the piebald lawns from the sprawling people, the dogs did their whatever wherever, the basketball court was single baskets, and there was no formal baseball field.

But as Ted learned when his grumbling Dad had to make a U-turn in sight of it, there was a baseball f ield of sorts. Too-high grass clogged the outf ield where it wasn’t raw dirt and pebbles. Even the inf ield was dirt and pebbles, the pitcher’s mound was flat, and there was no backstop.

But there were boys playing ball on it. Older boys in their teens, black, white, brown, various colors in between, no uniforms, ratty old jeans, gimme T-shirts, and more of them than not were not even wearing baseball caps. The catcher had a face-mask but no chest protector, there were no stands or overseeing parents, and there didn’t seem to even be an umpire, though it was hard to tell. But there was a full nine-player team out there in the field, and they did all have gloves.

The Nanny Bubble

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Ted had never seen anything like it in the “real world” or virtual reality. In the real world, baseball was Little League teams in uniforms, well-groomed two-thirds size fields, adult managers and coaches. In the virtual world, it was Major League Stadiums. This was neither. This was baseball as Ted had never seen it before. This was baseball as he had never even thought to imagine.

He found it fascinating. He wanted to get out and play. But there were already full teams playing and the boys were all at least four years older than him. But at least . . . ?

“Let’s go watch, Dad.”

Dad looked at him as if he had bitten into dogshit, completed his U-turn with ragged haste and swiftly drove away. “We do not go into the wrong side of the park,”

he told Ted, meaning, of course: you do not go into the wrong side of the park.

“Why?”

“ Because your mother and I don’t allow it.”

“Why don’t you allow it?”

“Because it’s dangerous.”

“Why is it dangerous?”

“Because the people in that part of town are poor and offline—”

“And not Strong and Smart like us?”

“You could say that, Teddy.”

“But if we’re stronger and smarter than them why does that make them dangerous? Shouldn’t it make them afraid of us?”

“It doesn’t work that way, Teddy.”

“Why not?”

“Because I say so!” Dad snapped at him. And if it really didn’t answer his question, Ted knew all too well that that was that.

At least from his father or his mother, who he knew, or had never thought otherwise, or somehow couldn’t think otherwise, were adults, and knew more than he did, and whatever they did, whether he understood it or not, was for his own good. That was neither cool nor uncool. He was just a kid, and that was the way it was.

Still, Ted did want to know what playing baseball when you had outgrown Little League was like, what it would be like to play ball like those big guys with no adults around, so he called up virtual baseball realities to find out.

Or tried to.

But there was nothing like it on the Kiddie Kool. You could play in historical World Series games in any position. You could be the hero of the game. You could pitch no hitters against the Red Sox or the Yankees or the Dodgers. You could be Babe Ruth hitting his sixtieth home run. You could hit five home runs in a single game on Mars.

But you couldn’t play baseball with a bunch of other boys on a ratty old field with nobody else around.

And try as he might, all that Ted could find out on Kiddie Kool Google or Kiddie Kool Wikipedia or the Kiddie Kool Dictionary was that this was called a “pickup game” way back when boys would do this by themselves, not because they wanted to but because they had to. But they didn’t have to organize games themselves any more, so nobody did it anymore.

Well, this might be what Kiddie Kool told kids, but Ted had seen for himself that in the real world it wasn’t true. It was a lie. And if that was a lie, what else that kids were told might also be lies?

Maybe there was one way to find out. Mom, Dad, and Aunty Nanny would know right away if he took off his HUGS, but if he took the morning S&S pills into his mouth and just pretended to swallow them and spat them into the toilet bowl when he went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, who was to know, what would happen . . . ?

Well, it turned out that no one seemed to catch him doing it, and as far as he could 162

Norman Spinrad

Asimov’s

“I’ve been writing my On Books column since 1983, more than thirty years now and counting, ever since Shawna McCarthy began her stint as editor, which I think must be the record for a literary critic in the SF field. Also short stories down through those years, and during all those three decades, Asimov’s has been my main squeeze magazine, and I’m pretty sure that more of my short fiction has been published here than in all other magazines combined.

“I can’t really say I grew up as a writer with Asimov’s; I had been published for a decade or so before it was born, but in a way, I do sort of feel that this magazine grew up with me. At the very least, we have matured upward and onward together. Isaac famously agreed with the sentiment that ‘the Golden Age of Science Fiction is Twelve,’ and as he meant it then, it was true. But I believe that thanks in part to the magazine that carries his name forward, the Golden Age of Science Fiction is the leading edge of the Now and may it always be so.”

—Norman Spinrad
tell, nothing seemed to happen. His Little League batting average didn’t drop, he didn’t lose any home run power or speed playing center field, so he wasn’t any less strong. As for becoming stupid, how could he tell if that was happening? There wouldn’t be a test in school for the next two weeks, and if he was getting stupid, might he not be too stupid to notice?

About all he did notice was that the virtual realities of Kiddie Kool seemed to be getting more and more boring, and so did school, and the only thing that really excited him was playing baseball.

Was that because they seemed stupid, not you, without the S&S pills? Had he been lied to about that too? Stopping taking the S&S pills certainly hadn’t made him weaker, and he didn’t feel any stupider. What did they really do? Just being able to ask such a question seemed to make him feel . . . smarter? More . . . clever? Some kind of . . . wise guy? Or was that just what it was like to grow up?

Little League was only a game or two a week, and while it had been way cool to be the best center fielder and hitter in the whole league, Ted was beginning to get bored with that too. Besides which, sooner or later, he would be too old for Little League, and who knows, maybe he had the talent to become a Major League ballplayer when he grew up, and that would be as way cool as possible.

He was a Little League star and he really had to test himself against older ballplayers, and he sure couldn’t see anything stupid about that.

But how to get to do it? Whether he was getting more stupid or not, he didn’t seem smart enough to figure out how to do that . . . until . . .

Dad was on a business trip in an airplane where they made you turn off your smart phone and HUGS, and Mommy was on her way to the beauty parlor to have her hair washed, cut, colored, and permanent waved, the last of which was done with her head inside some kind of metal dryer for at least an hour, which blocked her access to the whole internet, so . . .

As soon as she left the house, Ted went to Kiddie Kool Google Maps on his HUGS, got the best route from the house to the pickup ball f ield on the wrong side of the park, and drew it on a piece of paper. He waited an hour or so and then tried to call Mommy at the beauty parlor. When he got her voicemail he knew her head was now inside the blocking dryer helmet and would be for at least an hour.

Long enough. He put on his Little League uniform, grabbed his baseball glove, and jumped on his bike. He turned off his smartphone and took off his HUGS glasses with their 3D audio you couldn’t turn off. He was now entirely offline and Mommy couldn’t even know that he was until her head came out of the dryer. And then she couldn’t know where he was or get to him at all until he turned the phone with its The Nanny Bubble

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GPS tracker back on. So it was no sweat to follow the simple map he had drawn to the ball field on the wrong side of the park.

He doubted whether he could have figured this out before. Or wanted to. He didn’t seem stupider at all. Far from it!

It was a cloudy afternoon, not ideal for baseball except if you were an outfielder who couldn’t lose a fly ball in the sun, and the pickup players were still arriving and warming up. A couple of pitchers took turns throwing off the mound, harder than anything Ted had ever faced, but they didn’t seem to have much of anything but fast-balls, and the mound was further from the plate than in Little League, and he thought he could handle these guys or at least not embarrass himself.

The outfield was something else again, a much deeper and wider center field than in Little League, and Ted wasn’t so sure he could cover it properly, but on the other hand the guys who were shagging fungoed fly balls now and again lost high flys in the sun that wasn’t there, and dropped easy line drives. Just warming up or not, this was sloppy ball playing that would have had adult Little League managers screaming and cursing.

After a while, when no more players turned up, these teenagers all gathered together between the mound and home plate. Two of them played some kind of finger thing, managers or coaches, or captains or something, and began picking players one after the other until there were two teams facing each other.

Nine on one team and eight on the other.

And no one else around.

Some kind of argument started between the captain of the full team and the captain stuck with only eight players.

And Ted saw his chance.

He trotted up to that captain, a big black guy with dreads, maybe as much as sixteen years old.

“I can play, and I’ve got my glove,” he announced to laughter from both teams.

“I’m at least as good as most of what I’ve seen here.”

“Oh yeah, Little Leaguer?”

“I’m a cleanup power-hitting centerf ielder, and I lead the league in home runs, runs batted in, and batting average,” Ted boasted truthfully.

“Is that so, Mr. Little League MVP?” said Captain Dreadlocks.

“Yes it is, you could look it up on the league website. The name is Ted Smithson.”

The blond-haired captain of the full nine player team glanced at Captain Dreadlocks. “You got a better idea, Robbie?”

Robbie looked back at him, shrugged, then spoke to Ted. “Do I insult you by telling you you bat ninth and play right field, Mr. Power-Hitting Centerfielder?”

“I can deal with it,” Ted told him. “It’s a chance to show you what I can do.” And show myself too, he told himself.

And so he did.

If this had been a virtual game, Ted could have made himself the hero of it, four home runs, including a game-winning grand slam in the bottom of the ninth. If it had been a Little League game in real time, he could have been the star that he often was. But it wasn’t either. He was an eleven-year-old kid playing with teenagers on a full-size ball field in real time, and only because they needed another player. They stuck him in right field instead of center because that was where the fewest fly balls were likely to be hit and batted him ninth because that was where you batted your weakest hitter.

With two outs in the top of the first inning, Ted caught a high fly ball and made it look easy, which for him it was, unlike his team’s center fielder who bobbled one in the second. He didn’t get to bat until the bottom of the second. The third baseman 164

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and even the shortstop insulted him by playing the little kid so far up close that Ted had little trouble banging a line drive way over the shortstop’s head for a clean single.

In the top of the fourth inning, Ted caught a more difficult line drive, a neat enough play that would have earned him modest cheers if this were the Little League, but none of the older boys paid the kid much attention. If he had dropped the ball, which the left fielder had already, they probably would have hooted and yelled.

When he batted in the bottom of the fourth inning, the infield played back more respectfully, but the outfield really didn’t, and Ted hit an easy pop fly that should have been caught by the left f ielder if he hadn’t been playing so close behind the shortstop. Instead it went over the left fielder’s head, who managed to get a glove on it, but dropped it. If this was Little League and Ted had screwed up a play like that, it would have been scored an error. But here the only scorer was the hitter, and hey, what the hell, in his head, Ted counted it as another hit, if a cheap one. He caught one more f ly ball in the f ifth, this one a foul, and struck out in the sixth with two outs and a man in scoring position.

Was playing with the big boys in real time way cool? Well, he was no star center-fielder and cleanup hitter in this pickup game, and he couldn’t deny that he didn’t deserve to be. He was playing right f ield and batting ninth, and they only let him play at all because Robbie’s team was short one player.

But hey, these guys were four and five years older and bigger than he was, and he wasn’t embarrassing himself, or Robbie, who had given him his chance, and at least one approving little glance after the clean hit when he trotted back to right field. He doubted that any Little Leaguer, star or not, had ever been able to do this, and if he had proven himself even this much playing with the big boys, he didn’t need virtual reality to dream that he just might make it to the Major Leagues when he grew up.

But when he came off the field in the seventh, the sun was down far enough to remind him that Mommy must be getting home from the beauty parlor by now and freaking out because she didn’t know where in hell he was and couldn’t find out because he wasn’t wearing his HUGS and had turned off his smartphone.

What could he do now? This he hadn’t thought about. He could find his way safely back home inside the Unmagic Circle without the HUGS and the phone with the paper map he had drawn, but by now Mommy must be about to call the cops. He had to tell her he was all right, but if he turned on the phone even without wearing his HUGS, the GPS would nail him immediately and Mommy would know exactly where he was and have a fit, come and get him, or have the cops do it.

“What’s the matter, little Little Leaguer?” Robbie asked. “You look like you just struck out in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded.”

“I gotta go home now!” Ted blurted.

Robbie gave him an angry look. “You can’t do that! We can’t finish the game without a right fielder. You’ll make me look like an asshole! I won’t like that at all, Teddy Boy, and believe me, you’ll like it less.”

“But if I don’t go home right now, my Mom will call the cops!”

“Well, shit, we sure don’t want that! So just call her and tell her you’re okay and will back in time for dinner unless this game goes extra innings, which don’t seem likely.”

“But if I turn on my phone the GPS in it will tell her just where I am!”

“No problemo!” Robbie told him. “Use mine.”

And he fished out of a pocket the smallest, dirtiest, and apparently oldest smartphone Ted had ever seen, looking like it might have once been used by a caveman, and handed it to him. “No GPS tracker in this baby, kid—”

“No HUGS and not even a tracker? But how can you—”

“HUGS, bugs! Around my turf, you had better stay awake in real time all the time.

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And let’s just say there are people I can do without knowing where I am, and I don’t mean your momma or mine. But they won’t know either.”

Ted shrugged and called his mother. Smarter or stupider, he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

With Robbie’s phone and his HUGS off there was no Aunty Nanny siren frying his brains like eggs because he was outside the Unmagic Circle, but Mommy did a pretty good imitation.

“TEDDY! WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU! I CAN’T FIND YOU! YOUR GPS ISN’T

WORKING! WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOUR PHONE?”

“I’m not using it, Mommy.”

“What do you mean you’re not using it?” she demanded a little more calmly.

“I think maybe the whole phone broke, I dropped it off my bike,” Ted found himself lying surprisingly easily. “That’s why I’m calling you on Robbie’s phone.”

“Robbie? Robbie who?”

“Don’t worry, Mommy, I’ll be home for dinner—”

“Unless we go extra innings . . .” Robbie reminded him.

“Unless we go extra innings . . . which don’t seem likely . . .”

“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

“Just playing ball.”

“But there’s no Little League game today. . . .”

“I’m playing with the big boys.”

“What? Turn on your phone and GPS right now, Teddy, and I’ll—”

“I told you, it’s busted,” Ted told her. “I’m calling from Robbie’s phone.” And he dropkicked his own phone in the general direction of first base. Robbie gave him a grin and a thumbs up.

“Well why can’t I get this Robbie’s phone’s location either?”

“It’s got no GPS tracker.”

“WHAT? Who is this Robbie? How am I supposed to find you? How are you gonna get home?”

“On my bike—”

“But—”

“Don’t worry, I made a map.”

“A what?”

“Tell her where there’s a will, there’s a way, and hang up,” Robbie told Ted, and handed him the bat. “You’re up, kiddo!”

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way, Mommy.”

“Teddy Smithson, you—”

“I’m up now, gotta go.”

“You stop what you’re doing right now and—”

“Can’t do that, Mom, my team can’t finish the game without a right fielder!”

He handed the phone back to Robbie and walked up to the plate.

He was short, the pitcher was wild, and he worked a walk on a three-and-two count.

He popped up for the first out in the ninth inning.

So he wasn’t the hero of the game, and his team ended up losing.

But it was better than winning the virtual seventh game of a virtual World Series with a virtual grand slam home run in the bottom of the virtual ninth inning in a virtual Yankee Stadium, now wasn’t it?

Hey, wasn’t a clean hit, a cheap hit, and a walk way cool for an eleven-year-old kid playing in a game with the big boys?

In real time.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. ❍

166

Norman Spinrad

You can’t plan it.

When you find yourself
running
through unknown jungles
or the hulking remains of cities
like hollow, skull-less spines,
you may feel it—
just
behind
flirting with the edges
of your vision.

And you will know—
as hard as your feet
pounding the dusty earth
of some far-out world,
as hard as your heart
beating itself against
the cage of your ribs,
as hard as anything
and as true in any place—
death is the ultimate cosmonaut,
and you will meet
in the world you escape to
thinking you have left it behind.

—H. Mellas

I

MET A

TRAVELLER

IN AN ANTIQUE

LAND

Connie Willis

SFWA Grand Master Connie Willis has been writing stories for

Asimov’s since 1982, many of them Hugo and Nebula Award winners, like “Fire Watch” (February 1982), “Even the Queen”

(April 1992), and “Death on the Nile” (March 1993). She may be best known for her Christmas stories, like “All About Emily” (December 2011), “Newsletter” (December 1997), and

“All Seated on the Ground” (December 2007), and though her latest story for us isn’t quite a Christmas tale, it is set in New York in December. Of “I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land,”

the author says, “One of my favorite kinds of science fiction stories has always been the tale about a mysterious shop tucked away in the corner of the city and almost impossible to find. There aren’t nearly enough of those stories around, so I thought I’d just write one myself.”

The terrible thing about Manhattan is that all the streets look alike. And I can hear New Yorkers screaming bloody murder already, asking indignantly, “How can you say that? The Village and the Upper West Side look nothing alike, and how could you possibly confuse SoHo with Midtown?” and bleating about Carnegie Hall and Penn Station and the Met, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the streets. Especially the cross streets, though what I’m talking about applies to long stretches of Broadway and the avenues, too.

They’ve all got two or three restaurants and a deli, a hole-in-the-wall shop selling electronics, and another one selling Yankees baseball caps and Statue of Liberty pencil sharpeners and Radio City Music Hall magnets. There’s a Duane Reade and 168

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a newsstand and a branch bank or a fancy-dancy pet store or a shoe repair. And there are always hoardings, those board fences they put up around construction sites, so that you have to walk half the block between plywood plastered with ads for Metallica or Hamilton or the Sels-Floto Circus. And maybe if you’re a local you can tell the difference between Petronelli’s and Antonelli’s and Antonio’s Pizzeria, but to an out-of-towner like me, they all look as much alike as the Starbucks on every corner.

Which means even if you do happen on that great little antique store or bakery, you have no idea where it was and no way to find it again, unless it happened to be next door to Radio City Music Hall. Which it wasn’t. Or unless you noted the cross streets. Which I didn’t.

I was in New York doing publicity for my blog, Gone for Good, and meeting with editors about publishing it as a book when I found the bookstore.

I’d just finished doing an interview on Backtalk on WMNH, and Brooke had called to tell me the editor at Random House I was supposed to meet with canceled our one-thirty appointment.

“Probably because he heard that train wreck of an interview and doesn’t want Random House’s name connected with a book-hater,” I said, going outside. “Why the hell didn’t you warn me I was walking into a set-up, Brooke? You’re my agent. You’re supposed to protect me from stuff like that.”

“I didn’t know it was a set-up, I swear, Jim,” she said. “When he booked you, he told me he loved your blog, and that he felt exactly like you do, that being nostalgic for things that have disappeared is ridiculous, and that we’re better off without things like payphones and VHS tapes.”

“But not books, apparently,” I said. The host hadn’t even let me get the name of my website out before he’d started in on how terrible e-books and Amazon were and how they were destroying the independent bookstore.

“Do you know how many bookstores have gone under the last five years in Manhattan?” he’d demanded.

Yeah, and most of them deserved to, I thought.

I hadn’t said that. I’d said, “Things closing and dying out and disappearing are part of the natural order. There’s no need to mourn them.”

“No need to mourn them? So it’s f ine with you if a legendary bookstore like the Strand, or Elliott’s, shuts its doors? I suppose it’s fine with you if books die out, too.”

“They’re not dying out,” I said, “but if they were, yes, because it would mean that society didn’t need them any more, just like it stopped needing buggy whips and elevator operators, so it shed them, just like a snake sheds its skin.”

He snorted in derision. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Necessary things disappear every day. And what about all the things we don’t realize are necessary till they’re already gone?”

“Then society brings them back. Like LPs. And fountain pens.”

“And what if we can’t bring the thing back? What if it’s too late, and it’s already gone?”

Like the chance to have a decent interview, you mean? I thought. “That isn’t how it works,” I said, trying to keep my temper. “Bookstores aren’t disappearing, they’re just changing form. And so are books,” and I tried to explain about e-books and print-on-demand and libraries going digital.

“Digital!” he said. “How do you know all these digitized books won’t be accidentally deleted. Or disappear into the ether, never to be seen again?”

“That’s what the Cloud’s for,” I said. “It can store every book ever—”

He snorted again. “You’ve obviously never heard of Wheeler Field.”

Wheeler Field? What the hell was Wheeler Field?

“Wheeler Field was an Army airf ield in Hawaii during World War II,” he said.

“They got worried about sabotage, so they parked all the planes in the middle of the I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land

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November/December 2017
f ield. And when Pearl Harbor came along, one Japanese bomb took out the whole thing, bam! just like that. And according to your reasoning, that was proof we didn’t need those airplanes.”

“That isn’t what—”

“And I suppose you don’t think we need forests either. Or polar bears. I suppose you think closing one of the best bookstores in New York City is just fine?”

“Yes,” I said. “If it has outlived its usefulness.” And things really went downhill from there. By the time the hour was up, he’d accused me of everything from promoting illiteracy to setting fire to the Library at Alexandria.

“It wasn’t that bad,” Brooke said. “I thought you made some good points about how there are some books we’d be better off without, like Fifty Shades of Gray and Medi-tate Your Way to a Wealthier You. I loved that!”

“If I was so great, then why did Random House cancel the appointment?” I asked.

“Because he’s leaving for a big meeting in London. There’s supposed to be a huge storm coming in tonight, and he moved his flight up a day to beat it.”

Which was probably just an excuse. The sky, or at any rate the slice of it I could see between buildings, was devoid of clouds.

“He’ll be back Friday,” Brooke said, “and he wants to see you then.”

“Okay,” I said grudgingly. “But don’t send him the podcast of that interview.”

“I won’t. Oh, by the way, Harper Collins said they’d like to meet you for drinks before your dinner meeting with Tor. Will that work? Five-thirty at Fiada’s?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Great. And till then, kick back. Or go see the city—the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building or something.”

That wasn’t a bad idea. Not the Empire State Building part—I had no desire to spend the afternoon standing in line with a bunch of idiot tourists—but I hadn’t seen anything of Manhattan except what was visible through the window of a taxi.

Now, with my Random House appointment canceled, I’d have time to walk back uptown to my hotel and see some of the city along the way. It wasn’t particularly cold for November, and, according to the map on my phone, it wasn’t that far.

Wrong. The blocks between the avenues are three times as long as the ones between streets, and it was getting steadily colder. The sky had turned a leaden gray, and the wind whipping through the skyscraper canyons was really nasty. I decided to get a taxi and go back to my hotel after all, but they’d all unaccountably disappeared, and before I’d gone another block, it began to rain. And not an ignorable sprinkle—the cold, coat-soaking kind.

I spotted a guy one corner down selling umbrellas and ran over to buy one, but he was out by the time I got there. I had to walk forever before I found a newsstand that had some, and then wrestled for several blocks to get the damned thing up and then to keep the wind from turning it inside out, the net result being that I have no idea what street I was on. It might have been Thirty-sixth or Fifty-second, somewhere between Broadway and Madison Avenue. Or not.

At any rate, I was messing with the damned umbrella when the rain turned into a downpour, and I ducked into a recessed doorway and saw it was the entrance to a bookstore.

The old-fashioned kind of bookstore, about a foot and a half wide, with dusty copies of some leather-bound tome in the front window, and “Ozymandias Books” lettered in gilded copperplate on the glass.

These tiny hole-in-the-wall bookstores are a nearly extinct breed these days, what with the depredations of Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Kindle, and this one looked like the guy on WMNH would be ranting about its closing on his next program. The dust on the display of books in the window was at least half an inch thick, and from 170

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“I sold my first story to Asimov’s in 1981. It was ‘Fire Watch.’ Later that year, I sold them, ‘A Letter from the Clearys,’ and in 1982 both stories won the Nebula, which means Asimov’s can rightly claim to have given me my big break. I’ve been forever grateful to them for that, and for continuing to publish me through the years (despite the unconscionable amount of time it takes me to write a story), and for pestering me to produce more Christmas stories, which I love writing.

“I’m also grateful to have been associated with a magazine that cares so deeply about science fiction and tries so hard to find new authors, nurture old ones, and publish the best stuff in the field.

“But mostly I’m grateful that I’ve been able to spend my life with Sheila Williams and Gardner Dozois and Isaac Asimov and Trevor Quachri (now Analog’s editor) and everybody else at the magazine. Over the years they’ve become some of my dearest friends, and it’s been a delight to get to know such smart, funny, well-read, insightful people and to spend time talking to Sheila about everything under the sun and watching Gardner reduce everyone, including me, to helpless laughter (I once laughed so hard at a story he was telling that I snorted a piece of lettuce up my nose and nearly expired), and listening to Isaac tell wildly improbable stories that I didn’t believe for a minute, but loved hearing.

“Thank you for all the hilarious dinners and parties and convention-table gather-ings, for late-night conversations and early-morning awards breakfasts, for nearly getting thrown out of restaurants with Gardner and for getting thrown out of the Tupperware Museum with Sheila, and for hours and hours and hours of reading pleasure.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you for letting me be part of all this! It’s been a wonderful thirty-six years for me (and forty for Asimov’s!) I hope we’ll both be around for your fiftieth anniversary! And your hundredth!”

—Connie Willis
the tarnished-looking brass doorknob and the pile of last fall’s leaves against the door, it didn’t look like anybody’d been in the place for months. But any port in a storm. And this might be my last chance to visit a bookstore like this.

The inside was exactly what you’d expect: an old-fashioned wooden desk and behind it, ceiling-high shelves crammed with books stretching back into the dimness.

The store was only wide enough for a bookcase along each wall, one in the middle, and a space between just wide enough for a single customer to stand. If there’d been any customers. Which there weren’t. The only thing in the place besides the guy sitting hunched over the desk—presumably the owner—was a gray tiger cat curled up in one corner of it.

The rest of the desk was piled high with books, and the stooped guy seated at it had gray hair and spectacles and wore a ratty cardigan sweater and a 1940’s tie. All he needed was one of those green eyeshades to be something straight out of 84 Char-ing Cross Road.

He was busily writing in a ledger when I came in, and I wondered if he’d even look up, but he did, adjusting his spectacles on his nose. “May I help you, sir?” he said.

“You deal in rare books?” I asked.

“Rarer than rare.”

Which meant wildly expensive, but a glance outside showed me the rain was coming down in sheets, and it was still two and a half hours to my dinner appointment.

And it wasn’t as if I had to actually buy anything. If he’d let me browse, which if the books were that expensive, he probably wouldn’t.

“Were you looking for anything in particular, sir?” he asked.

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“No” was obviously the wrong answer, but if I named some title, it would be just my luck that they’d have it, and I’d be stuck paying two hundred bucks for some tat-tered, mildewed copy. “I just thought I’d look around,” I said.

“Be my guest.” He waved a hand at the shelves. “We’ve got an enormous selection, I’m afraid.”

Yeah, I thought, looking at the titles on the nearest shelf. And if it wasn’t all stuff like Surviving the Y2K Apocalypse and Gibbon’s History of the Liberty of the Swiss and The Vagabond Boys Go to Bryce Canyon , you might actually be able to move some of this merchandise. “Thank you,” I said, and he nodded and went back to writing in the ledger.

I started back along the narrow aisle, looking at the books. Rare? Obscure was more like it. I didn’t recognize a single title in the whole first section and only a couple of authors. Most of the names—Richard Washburn Child, Ethel M. Dell, George Ade—I’d never heard of. The books didn’t seem to be arranged in any particular order. A dark-red Moroccan-leather-bound copy of Nothing Lasts Forever: A Tale of Pompeii stood next to a torn paperback of The Watts Riots: What’s Next?, a 1950s an-thropology textbook, a dozen Harlequin romances, and a fancy illustrated copy of Fairy Tales for Wee Tots.

Obviously not grouped by topic or by author. By title? No, Promise Me Yesterday was cheek by jowl with A Traveller’s Guide to Salisbury Cathedral, Herman Melville’s The Isle of the Cross, and a 1928 Brooklyn phone book.

By price? I pulled out the Melville, but there was no slip in it and no price penciled lightly at the top of the first page, and nothing inside either Promise Me Yesterday or the Salisbury cathedral guide. Which must mean really expensive, though I refused to believe it or the phone book was worth more than a couple of dollars, to say nothing of Finlay’s Common Diseases of Holstein Cattle. And The Dionne Quintuplets in Hollywood.

Maybe the owner was an eccentric who was actually only interested in collecting books, not selling them, but the shelves were too neatly arranged, and as I worked my way toward the back, the books became less dust-covered and somehow newer looking, though the titles didn’t bear that out. Here was Ocean to Cynthia by Sir Walter Raleigh and Ben Jonson’s Richard Crookback.

There still didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the books’ arrangement. There was a Nine Steps to No-Effort Weight Loss on the same shelf as the Raleigh, and The Corpse in the Larder stood next to Grace Holmes’ Junior Year at Rosetree College.

And a Tiger Beat picture bio of Leonardo DiCaprio, circa the movie Titanic and cash-ing in on his then heartthrob status.

That could not possibly be considered a rare book by any def inition, and I was about to take it up to the front and ask the guy at the desk how much they wanted for it when a beautiful blonde in a black pencil skirt and high heels brushed past me, heading for the front. I was suddenly really glad I’d taken refuge at Ozymandias’s.

“Has Jude come in yet?” the blonde asked the guy at the desk, which meant she must work here, though she didn’t look the part. She looked like she should work at Bloomingdale’s. Or Vogue. And Ozymandias’s didn’t look like it could afford any staff at all, let alone three people.

“Have you heard from her, Arthur?” she asked. “We’re swamped back there.”

Back where? I couldn’t see anybody else at the back of the store. And come to think of it, where had she come from? There was no door to a back room that I could see, just more shelves lining the rear wall, and if she’d been in the aisle, I’d def initely have noticed her.

“Jude said she’s going to be late,” Arthur was saying. “There are delays on the subway.”

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The blonde made a sound of disgust. “Of all days,” she said. “Bryn Mawr had their annual book sale yesterday, and Lucille DePalma died.”

What that had to be do with being swamped with nonexistent book-buying customers I didn’t know, but their being engaged in conversation gave me a chance to go look at the back of the store.

I’d been right—there wasn’t a door. The shelves went all the way to the back wall and then turned the corner. The middle aisle of shelves ended a couple feet short of the wall, and I crossed over to the other side, but there was no door there either, just a spiral staircase leading up to a second floor and a sign with an arrow pointing up that read, “More books.”

The blonde was coming back. I hurried back to where I’d been, grabbed a book off the shelves, and pretended to be looking at it. She passed me without a glance, walked over to the far side, and shot up the stairs, heels clattering on the metal steps. After a minute, I heard a door slam, and, curious, I went up the spiral staircase. The second floor looked exactly like the first except that the back wall was only half-covered with bookshelves. The other half was a door marked “Storeroom. Employees Only.”

Which explained the “back there” comment. Except an upper floor was a peculiar place to store books, which are notoriously heavy. And what exactly would they be swamped with? Not preparing books for sale, since they didn’t even bother to put a price in them, and I refused to believe they were swamped with orders. There hadn’t been a computer—or even a phone—on the desk up front.

But she had made Jude’s arrival sound desperately needed, and Arthur hadn’t pooh-poohed her. What if Ozymandias’s was a front for something else—a smuggling operation or a drug ring or black ops? That would explain how it could survive in the middle of Manhattan on the sale of fusty old copies of antiquated boys’ books and Rex Stout mysteries. But if that were the case, Arthur would have discouraged me from looking around, wouldn’t he? And the blonde wouldn’t have advertised where she was going by slamming the door.

As I stood there trying to f igure it out, I heard another door slam. It was somewhere behind this one and below it, and I wondered if instead of a storeroom behind the door, there was instead a stairway and the storeroom was down on the first floor after all, or in a basement. But why would the door to it be up on the second floor?

Maybe there was a door downstairs, but it’s blocked by bookshelves, I thought. That was certainly more likely than some clandestine operation. And maybe the blonde always sounded urgent, and the work that was swamping her “back there” was a copy of The Vagabond Boys Go to Carlsbad Caverns that needed to be boxed up and taken to the post office.

But she’d said “we’re” swamped, not “I,” and she didn’t look like the histrionic type.

Her walk, her manner, her no-nonsense tone of voice had all denoted efficiency and organization. Boxing up the entire bookstore wouldn’t have fazed her.

No, something else had to be going on, and after another minute, my curiosity got the best of me and I put my ear to the door for a moment, listening, and then tried the doorknob.

I’d expected the door to be locked, but it turned easily. If it is a storeroom, and she’s inside, I can always say I thought this was the bathroom, I thought. But the shutting door I’d heard made me fairly sure she wouldn’t be there.

She wasn’t, and I was right, it wasn’t a storeroom. The door opened onto a stairway leading down, and just the kind you’d expect behind a bookstore like this: a narrow, rickety, poorly lit, Dickensian staircase with open wooden risers so you could see between them all the way down to the bottom. Where there was another door, just like I’d thought.

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But I’d been wrong—the door didn’t lead back into the bookstore. It was on the other side of the staircase, leading into whatever building lay behind the bookstore, and it wasn’t on the first floor. The stairs zigzagged down at least two full floors between landings to reach it. And the blonde wasn’t the one who I’d heard slamming the door, because she was still in the stairwell, standing in front of the door talking to a chubby guy in a T-shirt and jeans. “When’s Jude getting here?” he was asking.

“Soon, I hope,” the blonde said, glancing up at the door behind me.

I ducked out of sight, thanking God I’d thought to shut the door and that the staircase was so dark, and crouched there, listening.

“She should be here in the next fifteen minutes or so,” the blonde told the chubby guy. “Why? Did something happen?”

He nodded. “Tornado,” he said grimly. “In Alabama. Town museum and the library.”

“Oh, God,” the blonde said, exasperated. “Just what we need. Was it a Carnegie?”

“Of course.”

She sighed. “Can Greg stay late?”

“I’ll ask,” he said and disappeared through the door.

The blonde pulled out a cell phone and punched in a number. “Fran,” she said into it, “Is there any chance you can come in? We’re completely overwhelmed. Adelaide Westport died last week, and her niece flew in yesterday to clean out her house.” A pause. “From Cupertino.” Another pause. “It’s in northern California.”

And what the hell did this have to do with a tornado in Alabama—and what did either one have to do with selling The Dionne Quintuplets in Hollywood?

The blonde was still trying to persuade Fran to come in, even though a glance at my watch showed me it was nearly three o’clock and hardly worth the effort. Bookstores closed at five, didn’t they?

“Well, can you think of anybody else?” she asked.

Apparently Fran couldn’t because the blonde snapped her phone shut, stood there tapping her foot and looking down at her phone for a minute, and then went through the door.

As soon as it shut behind her, I racketed down the stairs, feeling like Alice chasing after the White Rabbit, and over to the door. As I put my hand on the doorknob, it occurred to me that what I was doing was beyond stupid. If Ozymandias’s was a front for a smuggling operation or the NSA, then there were likely to be guns—or Bengal tigers—beyond that door.

But neither the blonde nor the chubby guy were criminal types, and spies didn’t talk about Carnegie libraries and nieces from Cupertino even in code.

You don’t know that, I thought as I turned the knob. And if there is a Bengal tiger in there, nobody will ever know what happened to you. Nobody knows you’re here. I pulled out my phone to call Brooke and tell her, but I didn’t have any coverage, and if I took the time to text her, I might lose the blonde.

There wasn’t a tiger behind the door. There was another staircase. This one was neither rickety nor Dickensian. The steps were solid and cement and so were the walls, and it looked exactly like those stairwells in a parking garage, except that this one was brightly lit and clean, and there were books piled on nearly every step.

I went down a few stairs till I was at eye-level with the stack on the top step. They seemed to be more of the peculiar mix that I’d seen in the store— Remodeling Your Patio, Edgar Allan Poe’s Deep in Earth, Stewart Meredith Keane’s The Lone and Level Sands, a biography of Rutherford B. Hayes, and a banged-up paperback of Follow the Boys with Connie Francis on the cover—and just as randomly organized. Maybe Ozymandias’s didn’t have a storeroom, so this stairway had to double as one, with the blonde sitting on one step and using another as a desk.

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the blonde’s heels far below me, obviously going someplace. I took off down the stairs after her, trying not to make any noise and to calculate how far below me she was.

Three levels at least, though the head of the stairs was already at basement level.

Did Manhattan building foundations go down that far?

I doubted it. More likely, the cement walls were making it sound like she was farther away than she really was, and the bottom was only a single level below me.

It wasn’t. I passed one landing and then another, and no floor, no blonde. Just lots more books, and, as I descended, more and more of them. At first there’d been only a single stack of half a dozen or so books on any given step. But as I went down, the stacks got higher and more numerous, and I had to work my way carefully between them so as not to knock one of them over and alert her to my presence.

Her clattering footsteps came to a stop far below me, and a heavy door slammed. I waited a minute to make sure she’d gone through it and then hurried down after her, no longer caring whether I made noise or knocked over some of the books. I didn’t want to lose her.

The door she’d gone through had sounded like it was at least two flights below me, but either she was better at maneuvering between the maze of book piles or I’d mis-judged the distance again, because by the time I made it down to the next door, the landing outside it and the steps below were completely blocked by books. There was no way I could make it down another dozen steps, let alone down another floor.

And there was no way she could have picked her way through these books quickly enough to have made it to the next landing. She must have gone through this door.

I worked my way to it, stepping over and around the piles of books, and pushed on the heavy handle.

It opened onto another staircase, almost as filled with stacks of books as the first one, but this one had open metal steps that zigzagged down at least two more floors into a vast, cavernous warehouse filled with aisle after aisle of books stretching in all directions for what seemed like miles.

I stared down at it, stunned. It was huge. It had to extend the length of the entire block, and, according to my calculations, it was at least five levels below the street.

What the hell was this?

It must be a company like Amazon, which did most of its business by mail order.

But if so, why hadn’t I ever heard of it? And since when was there that big a market in used books? According to everybody I’d interviewed, public domain downloads of ebooks and Google Books had cut into their sales so much that even Powell’s was being forced out of business.

And if this was a mail-order operation, where were their shipping facilities? All I could see was Receiving, which consisted of a long metal slide that looked like a cross between a post office mail chute and an airport baggage carousel. Books were coming down it in a steady stream.

The blonde stood next to the carousel with a clipboard, supervising three burly workmen in overalls who were scooping the books up as they came down the chute and piling them onto big metal library carts. But not fast enough. The men were working at top speed, but they still weren’t able to keep up. Books were piling up on the carousel and beginning to fall over the edge.

In my surprise, I had let go of the door, and it shut behind me. The blonde glanced up hopefully, as if she thought I might be the late-to-work Jude.

Shit. What would she—or worse, the burly workmen—do when they saw me? I backed against the door and felt for the handle, ready to make a quick getaway, but the blonde only looked disappointed that I wasn’t Jude and then mildly annoyed.

She started briskly over to the staircase, frowning. “What are you doing in here?” she called up to me. “This area is restricted to employees only.”

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I clattered down the steps to her. “The guy at the desk told me to come tell you that Jude had trouble getting a taxi. Because of the weather. Wow, this is some operation.

How big is this place?”

“Not big enough,” she said disgustedly. “Did he know how soon Jude would get here?”

“No.”

“Oh, of all days for this to happen,” she said, and at my questioning look, “We’re absolutely swamped. Two used bookstores went out of business yesterday, and three libraries had their annual book sales.”

“And you bought all the books that were left over?”

“No,” she said.

They must have given them away. That would account for the motley assortment.

“And you grabbed them for your bookstore to sell?” I said.

“This isn’t a bookstore,” she said.

I stared at her as if she were crazy. Not a bookstore? Then what the hell were all these books doing here?

“Then what is it?” I asked finally. Some kind of library?” The New York Public Library was in midtown, wasn’t it? Could this be some sort of storage annex? Or the place where they processed books that needed to be checked in? Though if the ones on the shelves I was standing next to were any indication, there wasn’t much processing going on. They were as randomly shelved as the ones upstairs. An ancient-looking New Theories of the Atom, The Vagabond Boys Go to Yosemite, Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure, Iris R. Bracebridge’s The Daring Debutante. “Is this part of the public library? Or Columbia’s library?”

“Hardly,” she said scornfully. “Libraries are one of the biggest reasons we’re here.

Do you know how many books they destroy every year?”

“Destroy?” I said. “I thought librarians were all about preserving books.”

“They believe that in principle,” she said, “but in practice, they destroy hundreds of thousands of books a year. They don’t call it that, of course. They call it ‘retiring books’ or ‘pruning’ or ‘culling.’ Or ‘de-acquisition.’ ”

“De-acquisition?”

“Yes, it’s supposed to sound like the benign counterpart of ‘acquisition,’ but it actually means getting rid of works that no longer ‘serve the needs of the reading public.’”

Like The Daring Debutante and half the books upstairs? I thought, unconvinced that a little selective pruning was a bad thing. And it wasn’t as if they were eradi-cating them. “Selling them isn’t exactly destroying them,” I said.

“They only sell a tiny percentage of them,” she said, “and they’re swamped with donations they can’t use and not enough space for the books they already have, so most of the ones they discard end up getting sent to landfills—or recycling centers where they get pulped. And it never occurs to them that they might be the last copy of a book.”

“And so the purpose of this place is to make sure that doesn’t happen?” I asked, but she’d turned away to confer with one of the guys from the baggage carousel.

I didn’t really need an answer. It was obvious from what she’d said and from the hodgepodge assortment of volumes coming down the chute that this place was some kind of home for books nobody else wanted, like those no-kill shelters for abandoned cats and dogs, and to a certain extent, I could sympathize. Much as I tout digitizing books, there’s still something disturbing about the idea of shredding a physical book and/or dumping it in the trash. It’s way too close to Hitler and his book-burnings for comfort.

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bookstores the radio guy had said had closed. And she’d made it sound like they took in books from people who’d died, too. There was no way a single warehouse could accommodate all of those.

Though this place was bigger than I’d first thought, I realized, walking to the end of the row of bookshelves to peer down the cross-aisle. Rank after rank of crammed-full, twelve-foot-tall bookshelves stretched into the distance on either side of it.

What must the rent on this place be? And in Midtown Manhattan, too, let alone the equipment and the staff. Some eccentric book-loving millionaire must be bankrolling it. But if that was the case, why hadn’t anybody heard of it?

“Stunning, isn’t it?” the blonde said, coming back over to me. “Would you like a tour?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I thought you said you were swamped.”

“We’re always swamped. Hang on another minute, and I’ll get someone to cover for me.” She walked over to the carousel, calling to the guys, “Were you able to get in touch with Anthony?”

“Yeah, and he said he’d try to get here, but he’s over in Brooklyn, and the rain . . .”

“What about Thaddeus? Is he here?”

“Yeah. He’s downstairs.”

Downstairs? How many levels did this place have? I definitely wanted a tour.

“Well, tell him he needs to come up and fill in for me.”

“But, Cassie, the Wallace estate sale just came in—”

Cassie, I thought, glad to know her name. Was it short for Cassandra?

“I know.” She said. “Tell him it’s only till Jude gets here, and that I’ll send somebody down as soon as we finish with Mrs. DePalma’s books.” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I suppose it should be libraries. I can show you what I’ve been talking about. Come this way.”

She walked quickly along the bookshelves I’d been standing next to, gesturing toward the baggage chute and carousel as she went. “This is where the works come in, and these rows of shelves are where we store them till they can be catalogued.”

She strode to the end of the row and turned down a cross-aisle that seemed to stretch for miles, with aisle after aisle of bookshelves.

“Wow,” I said. “How many books—I mean, works, do you have here?”

“Too many,” she said, and turned left into an aisle that looked exactly like the one back by the baggage chute, with the books just as randomly shelved. “This is still part of the unprocessed section, right?” I asked.

“No, this is Private Collections.”

“You mean like the stuff they sell at Sotheby’s?” I asked. “Lord Such-and-Such’s priceless collection of first folios?” They didn’t look like it. Half the books appeared to be paperbacks or old textbooks, and they certainly weren’t leather-bound. Or organized in any way I could see. They def initely weren’t in alphabetical order. Or Dewey Decimal. I spotted Shakespeare’s Cardenio next to Irwin’s Maida’s Little Market as we passed.

Cassie was still walking along the row. “We occasionally acquire works from a bib-liophile’s or a rare-book collector’s estate, but the vast majority come from books people had in their attics or cellars or in an old trunk.” She stopped next to a trio of clothbound books. “These were Everett Hudson’s, 34 Mott Street, Greenwich Village.”

I remembered her talking about Mrs. DePalma and Mrs. Westport dying. “He died?” I asked.

“No. Dementia. He had to be moved into a nursing home, and his only son lives in Tokyo and couldn’t get time off to come clean out his apartment and get it ready to sell, so he hired a removal service to dispose of the contents. And these,” she said, pointing at the books next to them, “came from a barn.”

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She leaned over, I thought to take one of the books out to show me, and instead pulled out a stiff manila card tucked like a bookmark between it and Everett Hudson’s books. “Barn, Rouse family farm,” she said, reading from the neatly typed print on the card she was holding, “Clay County, Nebraska.”

She tucked the card back in its place between the two groups of books and walked rapidly on, indicating various shelves as we passed. “These are from garages and attics and these over here are from hoarders.”

Hoarders. I hadn’t even thought about all the books they’d have, though whether they’d be salvageable was another question. I’d known a guy who was a hoarder. Between the dirt, the rat feces, the cat urine, and the mildew, I wouldn’t have even wanted to set foot in his house, let alone scrabble through the disgusting mess for books. But from the number of shelves we passed, these people must have.

Unless these volumes were from some other kind of private collection. They had manila bookmarks dividing them, too, but there was no time to read their labels.

Cassie was walking too quickly.

After several more aisles, she turned into a side aisle, went down two aisles, turned into the third, and stopped. “Here we are,” she said.

“So these are the books the libraries got rid of to make room for Nicholas Sparks’

latest romance novel?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said bitterly, “plus the ones that didn’t pass the double-fold test and the ones that were deemed to be ‘too old,’ as if books were like cartons of milk and had a sell-by date after which they went bad. And,” she said, moving farther down the aisle, “the ones discarded during library relocations and renovations.”

There were divider cards here, too, each with the name and location of the library and a date, presumably of when they’d acquired it. But what a bizarre way to catalog books: by the place they’d gotten it from. It had to be hopelessly inefficient.

Though Cassie seemed to know where every single one was. “Blackthorne Public Library,” she said, without even looking at the identifying cards. “Lincoln Park Library, Franklin County Library.”

“Nothing from the Library of Alexandria?” I asked jokingly.

She didn’t even crack a smile. “We’re English language only,” she said. “And they wouldn’t be in this section anyway. They’d be in Fires.”

No, they wouldn’t, I thought, because the whole place had gone up in flames. There hadn’t been anything left to save.

“East Lake Library in Paul Harbor, Florida,” Cassie was saying, pointing at sections. “Mitchell Library in Sydney, Australia, Golden Library at Eastern New Mexico State University—”

“University? Colleges and universities de-acquisish, or whatever it’s called, too?”

“Yes, especially since the advent of InterLibrary Loan. They assume their students can borrow the work from some other library, so there’s no reason to keep their own copy, and it doesn’t occur to them till too late that theirs might be the only one. And Project Gutenberg and Google Books have made it even worse.”

Oh, here we go, I thought. “You don’t approve of digitizing books.”

“Oh, no, I’m grateful for it. Without it, we’d be even more swamped. But the libraries assume that all books are online and that therefore they don’t need to have a physical copy, and they dispose of theirs. Only they’re not all online. Just a fraction of them are. And there’s also the problem of data corruption. And of putting books onto microf ilm, which cracks and deteriorates, or into a digital format that can be accessed only through technological means, and then those means becoming obsolete, like the f loppy disk or twelve-inch video disks, like they did with The Domesday Book. Putting books on an inaccessible platform is nearly as effective at destroying books as the shredder.”

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I was afraid from here she’d go off on accidental deletions and the dangers of putting all your eggs in one basket like the guy at WMNH had. I said hastily, “But there’s always the Cloud. And the Library of Congress. They have a copy of every book that’s been published in the U.S., right?”

She shook her head. “They didn’t start doing that till the 1860s, and more than seventy thousand works are lost to decay and disintegration every year. Plus, they’ve had three major fires, with a combined loss of three hundred thousand volumes,” she said, “quite a lot of it due to the water damage that occurred when trying to put out the fires. Water damage is the second most common cause of book destruction.”

“What’s first?” I asked, but she’d already turned down another aisle.

“Water damage is along here,” she said. “Leaky roofs, broken plumbing, f looded basements. And down there are the f loods—the Ohio River, the Republican River, Yancey Creek, North Carolina . . .”

I looked at the books as we passed. Most of the sections had only two or three books, and Yancey Creek had just one, which was, fittingly enough, Noah’s Ark on Ararat.

It didn’t have any signs of water damage I could see, and neither did any of the other books, which meant they had to have been subject to some kind of advanced salvage technique.

I revised my theory of eccentric millionaire up to billionaire. Technologies to salvage waterlogged books cost big money. I’d researched the big 1966 flood of the Arno that had destroyed Florence’s National Library in connection with a pro-digitizing post I’d written. Their vacuum freeze-drying and other book-salvaging equipment had been wildly expensive.

Or maybe these were just the few that hadn’t gotten soaked.

“Flash floods,” Cassie said. “Sheffield; Big Thompson; Rapid City, South Dakota; Fort Collins, Colorado.” She paused a moment to indicate a shelf of books. “That one was particularly bad because the university library was being remodeled and all the Colorado history books and doctoral dissertations had been moved to the basement.”

Which explained why the books all had titles like Irrigation Techniques in Use in Dryland Farming and The Narrow Gauge Railroad in the Rocky Mountains from 1871–1888.

“Landslides,” Cassie said, still walking, not even glancing at the bookmarks as she passed, “mudslides, sinkholes.”

Shelving the books this way, by the agent of their almost-demise, was crazy, but it certainly highlighted the dangers facing books. Just like a nature preserve putting up signs telling what had decimated the particular species: poaching, acid rain, loss of habitat, pesticides.

There seemed to be just as many ways to wipe out books. As we walked, Cassie pointed out sections for censorship, changes in taste, academic trends.

“Academic trends?” I said.

“Yes. Some authors, like Dreiser and Alexander Pope, go out of favor with academics and are no longer taught. Or a book’s wildly popular and then just as quickly goes out of print and is forgotten.”

“Like The Bridges of Madison County, you mean?” I said, hoping they weren’t trying to rescue it. It was the perfect example of all those things society was better off without.

“Not yet,” she said. “I mean books like The Sheik and Elinor Glyn’s novels. And Charlotte Yonge’s.”

“Charlotte Yonge? I’ve never heard of her.”

“Exactly. At one time she was the most popular author in England, even outselling Dickens. And now no one even recognizes her name. And then there are books that I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land

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disappear because they’ve become outmoded or discredited, like Dirigibles: Our Future, and Using Your K+E Slide Rule.”

Or that surviving the Y2K apocalypse book, I thought.

“Or because they’re badly dated,” Cassie was saying, “like Flossie and Her School Friends and Ambush in Apache Canyon—

Ambush in Apache Canyon?

Finally, a book worth saving. “I remember reading that when I was a kid,” I told Cassie. “It was my favorite book. My uncle gave it to me. “I’d kill to read it again.””

I had no idea what had happened to it. Could my mom have given it to the library and it had ended up in this place?

“You have a copy of Ambush in Apache Canyon here?” I asked Cassie.

There was a pause, as if she thought I might try to steal it if she said yes, which convinced me it was my copy, and then she nodded. “Would you like to see it?”

“Yeah,” I said, looking over at the books, searching for the blue and brown and red cover.

“It’s not here,” she said. “It’s in the Children’s section.”

Oh, of course. That made sense. Kids’ books would end up in library discard piles and estate sales and attics, too.

“That’s over here,” Cassie said and led the way quickly down four rows, over an aisle, down another two rows to another aisle in a zig-zagging trail just like the one the kid had followed through the red rock canyons in Ambush in Apache Canyon, searching for the missing cattle. Except he’d ended up trapped in a box canyon with a band of Apaches leaping suddenly out at him from the rocks.

God, I’d loved that book. It had had everything a boy of nine could want—horses, six-shooters, war paint, cattle rustlers, the cavalry riding to the rescue. But I wasn’t surprised it had ended up in a library sale. Westerns had already been old hat in my uncle’s day, and as I recalled, the book had been full of politically incorrect language like “marauding wild Indians” and “red savages.”

And the book had been cheaply printed, on that paper that turns brown and brittle in a matter of months. It had already been in bad shape when my uncle gave it to me—the dust jacket torn, the binding half-detached, the pages coming loose—and in even worse shape by the time I’d finished reading it. Definitely a candidate for the landfill.

And no doubt the radio interview guy would cite this as an example of good things being lost, but it wasn’t. It was here, which was proof that if society needed something, it found a way to make sure it survived.

Cassie had gotten a long ways ahead of me. I hurried to catch up before she disappeared down one of the rows and I lost her. “Is this Children’s?” I asked as I approached her and she turned into an aisle.

But it clearly wasn’t. No picture books, or fairy tales, just more of the same kind of thing in all the other sections: Macleod’s Trout Fishing in the Hebrides, Milton’s Adam Unparadis’d, Henry Calvin Russell’s Marooned on Saturn, P.T. Hicks’ Chickens is Chickens, even what had to be another doctoral dissertation, Microbial Biosyn-thesis in Karstic Sediments, by Darryl A. Krauss, Ph.D. Not exactly Dr. Seuss.

“So how much farther to Children’s?” I asked.

“This is it,” Cassie said, and began pointing out divider cards. “Peanut butter.

Spilled Kool-Aid. Melted chocolate.”

Oh, books destroyed by children. Of course. I’d forgotten their weird method of cat-egorizing.

And now that I looked closer, I saw that there were some children’s books sandwiched in among the others. I spotted The Tale of Little Flinders and Tommy Toad’s Birthday Surprise and L. Frank Baum’s Molly Oodle and The Vagabond Boys Go To 180

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the Blue Ridge Mountains. Jesus, how many of those damned Vagabond Boys books were there?

“Left on the beach,” Cassie went on, ticking off the sections as she moved down the row. “Left on the bleachers, played catch with—”

“Dropped in the bathtub,” I put in, remembering the incident that had made me decide to get a Kindle.

“Yes,” Cassie said, continuing along the row. “Spitup. Teething. Torn up by a tod-dler. Colored in. Scribbled in with Magic Marker—”

Which would be even harder to remove than the stains of water damage, I thought, pausing to see how they’d gotten that out, but before I could look at it, Cassie called from the end of the row, “Here it is!” She held up a book.

Even from that far away I instantly recognized it. The blue and brown cover with the boy on horseback picking his way between the narrow, red-rock walls of the canyon was exactly the same as the one on my copy, but it definitely wasn’t my book.

This copy looked like new, the dust cover untorn, the colors unfaded.

“That’s it, all right,” I said happily. “Just like I remembered it. Have you read it?”

“No,” she said, “it just came in,” and put Ambush back on the shelf. “I was going to show you the Fires section,” she said, heading across the aisle and then over to another cross-aisle and down it, pointing out the various sections: “Earthquakes, Vol-canic eruptions, Shipwrecks.”

And how exactly had they managed to recover those? A submarine thing like the one they’d used on the Titanic? And was the Titanic one of the ships she was talking about? It had had everything—a gym, a bowling alley, a post office—which probably meant it had had a lending library, too.

I asked Cassie if it had.

“Yes,” she said promptly. “Four hundred volumes, plus the books the passengers and crew brought along with them—including Selden’s Modern Ocean Travel and The Plight of the Vicar’s Daughter, which we have here, and a priceless jeweled copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.”

Wow. “Is it here, too?”

Cassie looked taken aback. “No, of course not. There are still thousands of copies of the Rubaiyat in existence.” She bit her lip. “I don’t think you understand what this facility—” she began and then stopped, looking over my shoulder.

I turned. One of the guys who’d been unloading books from the baggage carousel was standing three aisles back with a clipboard and a worried expression.

“What is it, Greg?” Cassie called to him.

“Problem,” he said, waving the clipboard at her.

“Sorry,” Cassie said to me. “I’ll be right back,” and started toward him reluctantly, as if she wished she could finish saying what she’d been telling me first.

But I’d already figured it out. This wasn’t a no-kill shelter for books that had been thrown out. It was an endangered-book archive, like those gorilla and elephant sanc-tuaries or those repositories for rare types of seeds, to keep them from going extinct.

And it was the scarcity of a book that determined its place here, not its collectible value or literary quality.

The books here were the last of their kind, or close to it. Which meant that my falling-apart copy of Ambush in Apache Canyon—and all the other copies—must have been thrown out. Or washed away or burned up or de-acquisished by some librarian to make room for more copies of Harry Potter.

But at least there was still a copy here. And it proved that what I’d told the radio interview guy was true—that if something had value, society would f ind a way to keep it around.

Ambush in Apache Canyon def initely deserved to survive, though I wasn’t sure I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land

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Leonardo DiCaprio did, or Flossie and Her School Friends. Or all those doctoral dissertations.

But it explained why they were here. Only a handful of copies of those had ever existed. A flood could have cut the numbers in half.

What it didn’t explain was why they hadn’t recovered the jeweled Rubaiyat and sold it to finance this place. Which had to cost a fortune. We’d walked what?—half a mile?—already and were no closer to the end that I could see.

“Sorry,” Cassie said, coming back. “We just got hit with another deluge. Bookstore closing.” She shook her head. “We were already overwhelmed, and now this.”

I was afraid this was leading up to her saying she’d have to cut the tour short, but she didn’t. She started off again in the direction we’d been headed before, still talking over her shoulder to me. “And as if that’s not bad enough, Jude called and said she’s going to be at least another half hour. It’s apparently still raining hard outside, and the subway’s flooded. I told Greg to tell her to take a taxi, and we’d reimburse her, but I’m afraid she won’t be able to find one,” she said, sounding worried.

She should be worrying about this place instead, I thought, tagging along after her.

We were at least as far below ground as the subway system. A warehouse like this was likely to flood, too, and she had to know the danger, what with the survivors of all those past floods on the shelves we’d just passed.

But Cassie’s main concern seemed to be how long it would take for Jude to get there if she had to walk. “The taxis all vanish whenever it rains!” She said.

I looked down toward the end of the cross-aisle, but we were too far away from any walls for me to see if they were wet. I looked down at the floor. It was bone-dry, and I couldn’t see any puddles, or worse, trickles of water in the aisles. But I couldn’t see any pumps, either.

They must have some sort of built-in waterproofing—floodgates or something. But I remembered, post-Sandy, seeing photos of a flood-proofed, temperature-controlled, top-security wine cellar for rare vintages. The priceless bottles had been bobbing in six feet of water, their labels floating beside them.

And since they’d already had to dry these books out once, you’d think they’d at least be checking for leaks—or be setting in motion a plan for moving the books upstairs if necessary.

I hated to admit the radio guy who’d interviewed me was right about anything, but this place was another Wheeler’s Field waiting to happen.

But Cassie was only worried about Jude getting here now to deal with the books coming in from this latest bookstore’s closing. “It’s Elliott’s,” Cassie said, which was the one the radio interview guy had mentioned. “It had been there since 1899.”

Translation: it had a bunch of old books that might be endangered. I wondered exactly how they figured out which ones they needed to bring here. Was that the job of the old guy at the desk upstairs in the store?

But one person wouldn’t be enough for a job like that. Finding out how many copies of Fairy Tales for Wee Tots or The Vagabond Boys Go to Mount Shasta were left in the world would take tons of research. And how exactly would you go about it?

I wanted to ask Cassie, but she was still going on about Elliott’s closing. “There used to be other bookstores who could buy up their stock when one closed,” she said,

“but now, with so many having already gone under, there’s no one who can take them and see to it they survive.”

“Except you,” I noted, but she’d already taken off again, saying, “I want to show you the Fires section.”

“Fires?” I said, getting a sudden upsetting image of Cassie charging into a burning building to rescue books.

But she had her hands full here. There must be a whole other team—or teams—

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who did that, and that went and picked up the books from all those houses and storage units and bankrupt bookstores. Plus researchers to determine whether a book qualified as endangered. I upped my estimate of the cost of this enterprise another digit.

“Fire’s one of our biggest sections,” Cassie stopped to say. “As you can imagine.

Lightning-caused f ires, faulty wiring, arson, playing with matches, accident, civil disobedience. Or both.”

“Both?”

She nodded. “The Michigan State Library fire was caused by a student who was trying to burn the state draft board files so he wouldn’t be drafted and ended up destroying twenty thousand volumes.”

She started to walk again and then stopped, and I saw she was standing in front of a divider labeled “Dresden.”

“So this is the Fires section?” I asked, gesturing at it.

“No,” she said. “War. But there’s considerable overlap. That’s why they’re shelved next to each other. These rows are High-Explosive Bombs,” she said, walking me quickly past several rows, rattling off the names of the bombed buildings as she went: “Westminster Abbey Chapter Library, Allen and Unwin, Holland House, Lam-beth Palace, the British Museum Reading Room—”

“My God, how big is this section?” I asked.

“Big,” she said. “Twenty million volumes were destroyed by bombs in the London Blitz alone.”

“So is war the biggest?”

She turned to look back at me. “The biggest?”

“Cause of book destruction. You said water damage was the second biggest. Is war the first?”

“No.”

“Then what is?”

For a second I thought she wasn’t going to answer me, and then she said, “Time.”

“Time?”

She nodded. “Decay. Paper deterioration, ink degradation, glue oxidation, overuse.”

“Overuse?”

“Being read so many times the book falls to pieces.”

Like I’d done with Ambush in Apache Canyon. I could see its browning, brittle pages and its broken spine in my mind’s eye.

“Bookworms,” she said. “Dry rot, moths, mildew, mold. And attrition.”

“Attrition?”

“The gradual destruction of one copy after another over the years through a whole variety of circumstances. The ravages of time.”

I could see that. One copy lost at sea, another chewed up by the family dog, others sent to the landfill and put on no-longer-readable microfilm, and pretty soon there would be hardly any left.

“It doesn’t affect us here as much as at the other branches because English hasn’t been around as long as some languages,” Cassie said, “but it’s still our number one cause. Though war certainly contributes. These books are from the Library of Lou-vain.”

“It was bombed?”

“Yes, but not by the enemy. The Library’s Tower provided a landmark for the gunners to adjust their sights by, so the defenders destroyed it.”

She walked on. “This next section is Paper Drives. During World War II, they collected scrap paper to make into ammunition, including, unfortunately, old books.

And this next section is—”

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“Wait—other branches?”

“Yes. I told you, we’re English language only.”

“So how many other branches are there? And where—?”

“Cassie?” a male voice called from the cross-aisle. “Where are you?”

“Here, Greg,” she called back, and the guy from before appeared at the end of the row, looking apologetic.

“Don’t tell me,” she said. “Jude can’t find a taxi.”

“Yeah, she said she’s been trying for fifteen minutes and there’s not a one to be found, so she’s going to have to walk it, and, in the meantime, we’ve got another problem.”

Aha! I thought . This place is leaking.

But Greg said, “Today’s the twenty-first.”

“You’re kidding!” Cassie said. “I completely forgot.”

“We’ve got to get more people in here to help with it,” Greg said, “and I’ve called everybody I can think of.”

“What about Rita?”

“She said she’s already worked overtime every day this week, and—”

“I’ll talk to her,” Cassie interrupted. She turned to me. “Sorry, I need to go take care of this. I’ll be back in a minute,” she said and hurried off with Greg, while I wandered along the War aisles, wondering what was special about the twenty-first and looking at the books and the divider cards—Sarajevo National Library, Bosnian War; Library of Strasbourg, Franco-Prussian War; Library of Congress, War of 1812—Jesus, how long had they been doing this?—and then, since she still wasn’t back, went on to see if I could find the Fires section on my own.

She was right about the overlap. There were a half-dozen rows of shelves marked

“Fire-Bombings” and “Incendiaries” and two more that, judging by their dates, could have been either, and then fires that had clearly been civilian—the Windsor Castle fire, 1992; the Capitol Fire in Albany, 1911; Birmingham Central Library in 1879. . . .

The sections were all small here, too, including sections like “Los Angeles Public Library Fire,” which I remembered as doing major damage. But apparently only a handful of them had been books that were rare enough that they qualif ied for archiving here.

Or that was all they’d managed to rescue. I walked down the rows to see if I could find a section with more books in it.

Here was one. It took up two full shelves and half of a third. I peered at the divider card to see where these books had come from. “St. Paul’s,” it read.

St. Paul’s? Didn’t these books belong over in the War section with the other London Blitz stuff ? That was when Hitler had tried to burn the cathedral down.

But he hadn’t succeeded. St. Paul’s hadn’t burned. So why was this section here?

This must be some other St. Paul’s—St. Paul’s Catholic School or St. Paul’s College or the St. Paul, Minnesota Public Library.

If the titles were any indication, it must be. The titles weren’t those of religious books—John Ogilbie’s The Carolies, Sir William Dugdale’s Origines Judiciales, The History of Embanking and Draining, Sir Thomas Urquhart’s The Jewel . . . And anyway, what books would St. Paul’s Cathedral have besides hymnals and tourist guides?

I pulled out the divider card to take a closer look. No, it read, “St. Paul’s Cathedral, London,” and there was only one of those. It must have been hit by some incendiary bomb at some point that caused a minor fire. But that still didn’t explain what all these secular books had been doing in a cathedral.

“And call Terence,” Cassie’s voice said. “Tell him we’ll pay him double overtime,”

and I heard the tap of her heels coming toward me. I went out to meet her.

“Sorry,” she said. “It never rains but it pours. California just changed the period of 184

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time before unclaimed storage units can be legally auctioned off. It used to be three months, which meant the first, but they just changed it to twelve weeks, so now they hold the auctions on the twenty-first.”

“Storage units? Like on that TV show, Storage Wars?” I asked. “Where dealers bid on the contents and then sell them?”

“Or try to, can’t f ind any takers, and then toss them in the dumpster,” she said grimly. She turned to look at the books. “I see you found the Fires section.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “And I think I found some mis-shelved books.”

“Mis-shelved?” she repeated in a tone that said clearly, “That’s impossible.” She came over. “Which ones?”

I led the way down the row to the St. Paul’s section. “These. They’re marked ‘St.

Paul’s Cathedral.’ Shouldn’t they be over in the World War II section?”

“No,” she said, without even looking at the divider. “These are from the Great Fire of London in 1665.”

“Oh.”

“The booksellers and publishers in the surrounding area moved their books into the cathedral for safekeeping.”

Which had obviously been a good idea, considering how much of the rest of London the fire had destroyed. Including, apparently, most—or all—of the other copies of these books, since there were so many of them here. And it made sense that Ozymandias’s would have known they were the last copies when they acquired them—
they’d have had hundreds of years to check on their rarity.

But it didn’t explain how they could afford them—the last extant copy of a book from the 1600s would have been pricey even for a billionaire, and they’d have had to outbid the Folger and the British Library, and there were dozens of them here—or why, if they were as priceless as I thought they had to be, they were just sitting out there on the shelves for the taking instead of being locked in burglar-proof cases.

And it didn’t explain how they knew the rest of the books here— The Daring Debutante and Follow the Boys and Ambush in Apache Canyon—qualified as endangered, how they knew there weren’t dozens of other copies stashed in barns and hoarders’

houses and storage units people were still paying rent on.

“How exactly do you select the books for this place?” I said.

“Select?” Cassie repeated blankly.

“Yeah. How do you know if a book you find is the last copy of something? Is there a master list of endangered books somewhere or—?”

Cassie put up her hand to silence me, her head cocked as if listening, and after a couple of seconds I knew what had made her do that. The sound of footsteps.

“Greg? We’re down here,” Cassie called, and a head appeared around the corner of our row. But not Greg’s.

It was a young woman who had to be the long-awaited Jude. She looked like a drowned rat, her clothes plastered to her and great drops of water dripping from her black bangs.

“I’m here,” she told Cassie breathlessly. “What do you want me to do first?”

Get out of those wet clothes before you drip all over the books, I thought.

But Cassie didn’t even seem to notice her soaking wet clothes or the puddle she was standing in. “Go down to Manuscripts and ask Jerome if he has any rolling carts he can spare and then start clearing the chute.” She said.

Jude nodded and left, only to reappear a moment later, saying, “I forgot to tell you.

Thaddeus says he needs to talk to you. It’s about Lewis Carroll’s diaries. He wants to know if he should shelve them under Carroll or Dodgson.”

“Tell him—”

“And he had a question about Volumes 6 and 7. He said it’s really urgent.”

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Cassie nodded. “All right, tell him I’ll be right there.” She looked regretfully at me.

“I’m sorry I have to keep abandoning you like this. If you want to—”

Call it quits? Not till you tell me how this place works and how you can afford something like Lewis Carroll’s diaries, I thought. And why, in a section devoted to books that were nearly destroyed once in a fire, you don’t have a single fire extinguisher.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of time. You go. I’ll entertain myself by looking at bookburnings or something.”

Which was supposed to be a joke, but it went over as well as my joke about the Library of Alexandria.

“They’re four rows down,” Cassie said seriously. “Near the middle. Second shelf from the bottom,” and went off with the still-dripping Jude.

I went off to find the bookburnings section, wondering what I’d find. Probably not Hitler’s infamous bonfires—this was English-language only, and he’d burned mostly German and Polish books. And besides, there’d have been no way to rescue them.

Then what would they be? Fundamentalist burnings of Harry Potter or the Koran? No, neither one would qualify as endangered. Slave records that would in-criminate prominent Southern families? I’d read about a recent case in North Carolina where they’d burned a bunch of those. Or would they be Salman Rushdie’s books? Or Darwin’s?

It didn’t matter, because I couldn’t find the section at all. It wasn’t anywhere in the fourth row, or the fifth, which was devoted entirely to arson. I backtracked to the third to look, but it seemed to be all garden-variety non-arson fires—schools, houses, businesses: the offices of the Liberty Review, Maysburg Elementary School, Kenyon Dormitory—

Dormitory. I stopped, frowning at the card, remembering a dorm fire when I’d been in college.

It hadn’t been a big one. Only a couple of rooms had been damaged before they got it out, but the whole floor (and the one above it) had had to throw everything out.

The smell of smoke had penetrated not only the clothes and blankets and mattress-es, but everybody’s textbooks, their furniture, even the walls. And not the nice out-doorsy smell you get from a campf ire either—an overwhelming, sickening reek. I leaned over the books and sniffed.

Nothing. I walked back along the row and back up the aisle to the St. Paul’s books, taking periodic whiffs.

Still nothing.

The smell of smoke had been impossible to get out. They’d tried everything: washing, dry cleaning, repainting, buckets of industrial strength odor-remover, but nothing had worked. It was still there.

And yet here I was, supposedly surrounded on all sides by rows and rows of books that had been rescued from fires, and there wasn’t the slightest hint of smoke.

These people have technologies for de-mudding books and rescuing them from the bottom of the ocean, I told myself. Maybe they’ve got one for getting rid of smoke.

But even if they had, there should have been a lingering whiff of it left, with all these thousands of books. Just like there should have been a smell of cordite in the War section and of damp over in Water Damage. And in the rest of it, that musty dust-and-decay smell that’s part and parcel of every old bookstore and library. I’d never been in one that didn’t have it. Except this place.

Okay, so maybe it was temperature- and atmosphere-controlled, which would seem to be a requirement with all these irreplaceable books, but I could see no indication of that, just like there was no sign of any sprinkler system or smoke alarms.

Which safety regulations required, along with emergency lighting and exit signs.

Which I couldn’t see anywhere either.

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Don’t be ridiculous, I thought. They’re just too far away for you to see them.

Even though we’d come what felt like miles, I was no closer to the end of the facility than I had been. And maybe now, with Cassie gone, would be the perfect opportunity to see exactly how big this place was.

I took a quick look back to make sure she wasn’t returning yet and set off down the cross-aisle, counting rows so I wouldn’t get lost, and intending to go all the way to the far wall. But thirty rows later I was no closer, and ahead the way was blocked by one of those big warehouse loaders, filled with pallets full of books.

I had to go over a row to the next aisle, only to run into a grilled-off area filled with what looked like stacks of old ledgers.

I went down several rows, looking for a way around it, without success, and then decided I’d better go back to Fires before I got lost.

Too late. I’d thought I’d kept track of the number of aisles and cross-aisles I’d come, but I must have lost track at some point. I couldn’t find Fires or War—the books here were all weather-related disasters—hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis—and in the row I’d have sworn I’d started from, there was a Post-it note stuck to a shelf that read,

“Cassandra, these works were donated by a library to a school in Bangladesh.

Should they be shelved in culling or typhoon?” that I was positive I’d have noticed if I’d been here before.

I must have gone over three aisles instead of two. I walked back another, and another, but there was still no Fires section—and no sign of Cassie. And no sound of anybody coming.

The thought came to me, like it had on the staircase coming down here, that nobody had any idea I was here. And that if this wasn’t a nature preserve for books, if it was something else—a front for drug-smuggling or armaments dealing or something even more bizarre—that they didn’t want anybody to f ind out about, that they wouldn’t need to cosh me over the head or brick me up in a wall, like a character in an Edgar Allen Poe story. All they had to do was abandon me in the middle of this labyrinth like Cassie just had, with no bread crumbs and no map. And no way to call for help, because this far underground, there couldn’t possibly be any cell phone coverage.

And there wasn’t, not a single bar. I walked several aisles over and one down, holding the phone up, trying to get some reception, but I didn’t get anything, and it came to me belatedly that by wandering around I was making things worse. If Cassie hadn’t left me here to die, she’d expect me to be where she’d left me or close to it.

I had no idea where that was or even what direction Cassie had gone in when she left with Jude. Or which way the baggage carousel lay from here. All I could see on every side, stretching away into the distance, was aisle after aisle of bookshelves that all looked exactly alike.

There must be something I could orient myself by—a book’s distinctive color or its title—but I didn’t see anything I recognized.

The puddle Jude’s wet shoes and dripping clothes made, I thought, and went quickly along the aisle I was in, and then the next, looking for wetness on the floor of the cross-aisles, but either it had dried or in trying to reach the wall I’d gone farther afield than I’d thought.

Or I was going in circles. Which was entirely possible, given the sameness of the shelves of books. I needed to find a way to mark my path so I’d at least know where I’d been. I fumbled in my pants pocket, looking for change—or lint or something I could use as bread crumbs, but all my pockets yielded was a dime and two pennies, and there wasn’t anything here to use.

What was I saying? The shelves were chock full of bread crumbs— Heartbreak Summer and How to Write a Thriller in Five Days and, especially appropriate, I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land

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Following in the Master’s Footsteps. I could leave a trail of them on the f loor to mark which direction I was going and where I’d already been.

I was reaching for Mme. Shirotsky’s Visitations from Beyond the Veil when I thought I heard something. I went out into the cross-aisle to listen and heard the unmistakable click of Cassie’s heels, though I still couldn’t see her. And she wouldn’t be looking for me here, wherever here was.

“Cassie?” I called, and at the same instant, my phone rang.

I stared at it. It still wasn’t showing any bars, and I knew there couldn’t be any coverage down here, but there was, and when I answered it, Brooke’s voice was clearer than it had been on the street outside WMNH.

“I’ve been trying to get you for half an hour,” she said. “Where are you?” and before I could answer, “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you get yourself over to Random House. Your meeting’s back on.”

“I thought he’d left for London.”

“They canceled his flight because of the weather. He’s got a seat on the eleven-ten.

Which means he can see you. If you can get there in the next fifteen minutes, that is.

You can do that, can’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I said, thinking of how long it would take me to get back to the baggage carousel—assuming Cassie got here to show me the way—and then to run up all those flights of stairs to the bookshop.

“What do you mean?” Brooke said. “Please don’t tell me you’re out in Brooklyn or at the Statue of Liberty or something.”

“No, I’m in Midtown,” I said, “but—”

“Oh, good. I’ll tell him you’re on your way. Bye.”

“No, wait! Before you hang up, I need to tell you where I am. I stopped in this bookstore called Ozymandias—” but I was talking to dead air. She’d already ended the call.

Shit, shit, shit. I hit redial. I got a “call cannot be completed” screen, and before I could try again, Cassie appeared at the far end of the cross-aisle.

“Sorry,” she said. “There was an earthquake in La Jolla. Did you think I was never coming back?”

“Listen, I’m afraid I’ve got to leave,” I said. “I just got a call from my agent. She set up an appointment for me with a publisher—”

“Oh, too bad,” she said. “I wanted to show you the Thefts and Vandalism section.

Are you sure you don’t have time to—?”

“Afraid not,” I said. “It’s in fifteen minutes.”

“I understand,” she said and started briskly back up the cross-aisle the way she’d come.

I followed her. “It’s at Broadway and 56th,” I said doubtfully. “Do you think I’ll be able to make it in time?”

“Your appointment’s at four?” she said, turning down a side-aisle. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

Good, I thought as she made another turn. That means there’s one of those loaders nearby, but none appeared, and she seemed to be heading in the opposite direction of the way she’d come.

“Are you sure—?” I began.

She nodded. “You can take the elevator.”

Elevator? I thought, following her. What elevator? There hadn’t been an elevator in the bookstore. But here was one.

“This’ll take you to street level,” she said, pushing the button on the wall beside it.

The door opened immediately on a large freight elevator full of rolling carts stacked with books. There was barely space for me to squeeze in.

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“I’m sorry to rush off like this,” I said, wedging myself between two of the carts.

“Can I take a raincheck on the rest of the tour? Or I guess it should be a fair-weather check. I really want to see all of this. It’s an amazing place.”

“Yes,” she said, reaching inside to push one of the buttons on the panel and then stepping back out of the elevator. “It is.”

“Is there a time that’s good?” I asked. “Some time when you aren’t so busy?”

She shook her head. “There’s no such time,” she said, and before I could say anything else, the door slid shut and the elevator started moving.

Let’s hope it’s not as slow as most freight elevators, I thought, and the elevator gave a groan and lurched to a stop.

Not now, I thought. There went the interview. I reached for the red emergency button.

There wasn’t one, and none of the buttons on the panel were numbered.

I looked at my phone—no bars—and it occurred to me, too late, that an elevator would make an even better trap than that labyrinth of books, in which case yelling,

“Get me out of here!” wasn’t going to do any good.

Neither would pushing the buttons, but I jabbed at them anyway, and, after a long, panicky moment, the door began to slide open.

I peered cautiously out, afraid of what might be out there. More endless rows of shelves? Or something worse?

No, but it wasn’t the bookstore either. I was in an old-fashioned office-building lobby of greenish marble. This must be the building next door to Ozymandias’s, I thought. Or, considering how long those aisles had been, several doors down.

I could see through the fancy glass-and-grillwork revolving door at the front of the lobby that it was getting dark and still raining hard. I could also see a taxi sitting out front, and wonder of wonders, it had its light on.

I shot through the lobby, out the revolving door, and into the cab. “Can you get me to 1745 Broadway in ten minutes?” I said, even though I saw now that the reason he’d been sitting there was that traff ic was completely gridlocked. “There’s f ifty bucks in it for you if you can.”

“You got it,” he said, and maneuvered the cab into a nonexistent right-hand lane, and raced past a truck and down the street, missing a woman with an umbrella by millimeters, and a bicycle messenger by less than that.

When I was able to breathe again, I looked back to try and see where I’d come out and determine how far it was from the bookshop, but we’d already turned the corner and were moving up a side street.

Which one? Sixth Avenue? Seventh? I tried to spot a sign so I’d know which street the bookshop had been on, but the rain was turning into snow, and between that and the darkness, streaked with red and green and orange light, it was impossible to make out what the ones we passed said.

I gave up, texted Brooke to tell Random House I was on my way, but it was going to be close because of the traffic, and then looked up which side of the street it was on so the driver could drop me in front of it and maybe save a couple of minutes, and by the time I’d f inished telling him, “It’s on the west side, in the middle,” we were at Ninth Avenue and 55th, a fact I knew because the traffic had slowed to a dead stop right in front of the sign.

Three blocks away. And it was 4:53. I peered out at the sleet, wondering if I should get out and make a run for it, but, based on the pedestrians I saw, I’d freeze before I got there, and the cabbie was already turning into a nonexistent gap and bulling his way up the street.

He pulled up in front of Random House with nanoseconds to spare. I thrust three twenties at him and opened the door.

“You want a recei—?” he began.

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“No,” I said, and flung myself out of the taxi, across the wet sidewalk, and into the building. Only to find that the editor was already gone.

“He was able to get a flight out of Newark,” the receptionist told me. “He said to tell you he was sorry about making you come all this way and that he’d text you.”

He did. “SORRY TO CANCEL. HAD A CHANCE AT ANOTHER FLIGHT AND THOUGHT I’D BETTER TAKE IT. STORM’S SUPPOSED TO GET WORSE. WILL RESCHEDULE.”

And a couple of minutes later, “LISTENED TO YOUR WMNH INTERVIEW. YOUR COMMENTS WERE GREAT. DEFINITELY WANT TO MEET WITH YOU ABOUT DOING BOOK.”

And immediately after that, “ESPECIALLY LIKED THE WHOLE ‘GOODBYE AND GOOD RIDDANCE’ THING. AND THE FACT THAT BOOKS ARE IN NO DANGER OF DISAPPEARING.”

I’m not sure that’s true, I thought, remembering that deluge of endangered books pouring down the conveyor belt, and was about to text him about it, but he’d already sent, “Have to go. Boarding,” and besides, it would be more impressive to hit him with the whole story of the book preserve and how it worked, so I texted, “Bon voyage,” and then went back out into the sleet, which was rapidly turning into snow, and tried to find a taxi to take me to Fiada’s.

There wasn’t a taxi to be found, and ten minutes later an assistant from Tor called to tell me they were canceling the dinner because of the weather, followed by a call from Harper Collins doing the same thing with the meetup for drinks.

I was just as glad. Getting another taxi seemed to be out of the question, I was freezing, and all I wanted to do was get out of these drenched clothes, get something to eat, and go to bed. Because if I was going to write about Ozymandias’s operation, I needed to go back there first thing tomorrow morning and get Cassie to give me the rest of the tour including those other f loors and answer some questions. Like, how had they managed to get the smell of smoke out of those books? And what precautions had they taken to make sure they didn’t become the next Wheeler Field?

If they hadn’t already. There were tons of stories on the news about flooded basements and ruined merchandise, including one about a designer shoe store’s basement full of floating Ferragamos and Jimmy Choos.

There wasn’t anything about Ozymandias Books, but the shoe store was on 48th.

They could very well be in the same block. Which reminded me, I needed to find out the bookshop’s address. Between the rain and talking to the cabbie and checking the time, I had no idea what street it was on.

I typed the name into my GPS app, hoping I wouldn’t need an address for it, but it didn’t work, and trying the same thing on MapQuest and Google Maps didn’t either.

And all googling “Ozymandias Books” brought up was a headshop in Boulder, Colorado, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem about a traveler in the desert who stumbles onto a monument to some forgotten pharaoh that has an inscription that says, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” even though whatever “works” he’d had have long since disappeared.

Just like Ozymandias Books seemed to have done. I changed the search to “Ozymandias Bookstore.”

That got me a bunch of bookstores that had copies of Ozymandias and Other Poems and Shelley’s Complete Works for sale and a coffee-shop/used books-and-records/internet café in Dubuque. I ref ined the search to “Ozymandias Bookstore Manhattan.”

That kicked up two bookstores in Manhattan, Kansas, and a book about the Manhattan Project. I changed Manhattan to NYC and got a list of thirty bookstores, including f ive Barnes and Nobles and the just-closed Elliott’s, but not Ozymandias Books.

Come on, the address had to be listed somewhere. I didn’t have time to walk all over Manhattan looking for it. Come on, the address had to be listed somewhere. I 190

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didn’t have time to walk all over Manhattan looking for it. I googled “NYC bookshops,” “NYC used books,” and “NYC used bookstores” and then remembered Cassie’s saying “We’re not a bookstore,” and tried “book preserve” and, even though she’d said it wasn’t a library, “NY libraries.”

That brought up a photo of the 1911 Albany Capitol fire, which made me wonder all over again how they’d gotten the books out—flames shot from every window in the old Victorian building.

There was no listing for Ozymandias’s under “archive” either, and I eventually gave up and went to bed.

In the morning I tried “book storage” and “book depository” (which brought up the Kennedy assassination), and “rare books,” with no results, and then had an idea.

Maybe there was a phone book in my room, even though it was one of the things I’d posted about as going the way of the dodo, and I could find Ozymandias in it.

There wasn’t, and the person at the desk downstairs didn’t even know what a phone book was. “There’s an Apple store in Times Square,” she suggested tentative-ly. “They might have a book on phones, I guess.”

I tried to explain what a phone book was and why I needed it.

“Can’t you just look up the address on your phone?” she said.

“Why didn’t I think of that?” I said, and since it looked like the rain had more or less stopped, went out to see if I could find the place on foot.

I had a general idea of the bookshop’s location—somewhere in the upper Forties or low Fifties between Madison Avenue and Broadway, which was only an area of twenty blocks, and I could eliminate some of them right off the bat. Obviously Ozymandias’s hadn’t been on the same block as Grand Central Station or 30 Rock, or I’d have noticed.

And I’d be able to eliminate others by what I remembered of the street Ozymandias’s was on. It had been in the middle of the block, in a recessed doorway, and there’d been a deli in the same block and a souvenir shop—and maybe a florist’s? or a nail salon? and somewhere in there some hoardings where they were repairing one of the buildings, all of which should make my job easier.

That’s what I thought. It only took me half an hour to realize what I told you at the beginning, that all of Manhattan’s streets have delis and scaffolding and souvenir shops and that all of them look exactly alike.

The taxi driver who’d taken me to Random House. He might remember where he’d picked me up. But I had no idea what the taxi’s number was, and I’d paid cash and jumped out the minute we got there, so I didn’t have a receipt either, and I only vaguely remembered what the driver had looked like. He’d had an accent, but I had a feeling that in New York that wasn’t going to be enough to narrow it down.

I did remember what the fare had been—six-eighty. I hailed a cab, got in, and asked the driver, “If the destination was Fifty-seventh and Broadway, and the fare was six-eighty, how many blocks would you have taken me?”

He had an accent, too. “Are you saying I cheat my customers?” he said, and ordered me out.

“Wait,” I said. “Do you know what street Ozymandias Books is on?”

“Out. Before I call 911.”

I got out, and went back to walking the blocks again, going up and down them till they blurred into an endless stream of pizzerias and shoe repairs and Starbucks, and I had no idea which blocks I’d checked and which I hadn’t. Or what damned street I was on.

It was like when I’d gotten lost in Ozymandias’s stacks looking for the bookburning section, with no idea of how to get back to where I’d been or even where I was, and every aisle of books looking exactly like every other.

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I went back to the souvenir shop I’d just passed, bought a tourist map and a pen shaped like the Empire State Building (the only kind they had) and tried again, this time crossing each block off on the map as I finished walking it, and marking each corner deli, each souvenir shop. I found lots of them and lots of scaffolding, but no Ozymandias Books.

Maybe it was in one of those blocks I’d previously eliminated. It had, after all, been raining, and I’d been focused on finding shelter, not on my surroundings. I walked up to Rockefeller Center, but one look at the skating rink and that giant gold statue of whatever it is convinced me I couldn’t have not noticed it, even in a deluge.

That meant it wasn’t in the blocks I’d mapped out and I must have walked farther north after that interview than I’d realized. I expanded the search up to Fifty-Third Street, which took me the rest of the day, and the next morning enlarged it farther, over to Park Avenue.

Still nothing. Could it have been farther south? I expanded the grid again, down to Thirty-Eighth Street and then Thirty-Fourth.

Maybe there’ll be another miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, I thought, and Ozymandias’s’ll be there, right next door to Macy’s.

But the only thing next door to Macy’s was a Victoria’s Secret and then the Empire State Building, and when I stepped out into the street to try to see what was in the next block down from that, I was nearly hit by a cab.

That gave me an idea. Just because the taxi driver hadn’t known where Ozymandias’s Books was (or wouldn’t tell me), it didn’t mean somebody wouldn’t. I went back up to Forty-Fifth and started walking the blocks I’d originally checked, this time stopping in every coffee shop and bar and barber shop I came to and asking them if they knew where Ozymandias Books was and/or if they knew of a bookstore in this neighborhood.

I got answers ranging from “Never heard of it,” to “There used to be a bookstore over on Eighth Avenue, but it closed last year,” to “No bookstores in this part of town.

The rents are too steep.”

It was getting dark. I’d only covered about a third of the territory I’d mapped out to ask people in, but I was dog-tired. I took a taxi back to the hotel, watching the meter and trying to calculate the price per block, still hoping to locate Ozymandias’s that way, but no dice—the fare was based on time, not distance, and when I got back to the hotel, I got a text from Brooke wanting me to call her. I hoped it didn’t mean the Random House guy was coming back sooner than expected.

It didn’t, but it was almost as bad. She’d set up a bunch of interviews and meetings for me for the next few days.

“No,” I said. “You need to cancel them.”

“They won’t be like the WMNH interview, I promise.”

“That’s not it. It’s that I don’t have time. I’m too busy to do any interviews or meetings.”

“Busy? Doing what?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, hung up, found a hotel on Forty-Eighth so I’d be closer to the search area (and so Brooke couldn’t come over and drag me off to meetings), moved my stuff over to it, and got on Google Earth, wondering why I hadn’t thought of that before.

It rapidly became apparent. Because it was designed for finding a particular address and zeroing in on it, not scanning whole streets, and the resolution wasn’t good enough to always make out the numbers above the doors, particularly on the office buildings.

Office buildings. Maybe that’s what I should be looking for, since I was having so much trouble finding the bookstore. When I’d come up, it had been into an old-fashioned office-building lobby with a revolving door. If I could find it, I could simply take 192

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the elevator down to the stacks. Plus, it had to have been only a few doors down, a block at the most, from the bookshop entrance. Using it as a point to orient myself by, I could find Ozymandias’s itself.

Except I couldn’t f ind the damned lobby either. I spent I don’t know how many days looking for it with no luck. It wasn’t that there weren’t any revolving doors or lobbies. There were scores of them, a lot with the marble walls and old-fashioned brass grillwork I remembered, but not the one I’d raced through to get to my taxi.

I tried their elevators anyway, but they only went down one or two levels and opened onto cobwebby furnaces or suspicious building supers. Or both.

You’re going to have to try something else, I told myself when I got back to my hotel after a particularly frustrating day. But what? I supposed I could ask Brooke if she knew where Ozymandias Books was. She was a native New Yorker. But if I called her, she’d demand to know why I’d been ignoring all her messages and texts, and I was afraid she’d start talking about meetings and interviews again, and I didn’t have time for that.

And if I called the WMNH interview guy, he’d go off on a rant about the death of the independent bookstore.

I was on my own here. I supposed in the morning I could expand the search area again—or the kinds of lobbies to look at. I’d been in a tearing hurry to get to my appointment that night and hadn’t really gotten a good look at the lobby—or the door.

Maybe I’d been wrong about it having been a revolving door.

But I couldn’t do either of those till morning. Till then, I decided to call up that list of New York City bookstores I’d found earlier and ask the ones that were still open if they’d heard of Ozymandias Books. I figured if anybody’d be likely to know where it was, they would.

But they didn’t, and, halfway through the list, I realized I was going about this all wrong. The books were the way to find it. If the ones on Ozymandias’s shelves really were among the last copies in the world, then googling their titles would lead me there, as the only place they could be found. I typed in Ambush in Apache Canyon.

Three items came up—a Wikipedia entry that turned out to be one of those space holders for an unwritten entry, a blog post by someone else who’d read the book when he was a kid and wanted to buy a copy, which ended, “If anybody knows where I can purchase one, I’d be willing to pay top dollar. I can’t find one anywhere!” and a listing on Amazon.

I’d thought Cassie had said they weren’t a bookstore, and this might be some other copy and she was exaggerating how rare their books were, but it was worth a try.

I clicked on it.

But all it showed under “Copies Available” was a dash, which meant they didn’t actually have the book, and when I tried AbeBooks, it said, “No exact match. Do you care to expand your search?”

No, that was the last thing I wanted. The whole point was to narrow it down, not make it broader. I tried looking for the book on BookFinder and Alibris.

It wasn’t listed on any of them.

But Cassie had said it had just come in recently. Maybe they hadn’t had time to list it. I needed to try some other title. If I could remember one. There’d been a Vagabond Boys Going Somewhere Or Other, but I had no idea where, and a Grace Harlowe at Some College or Other. And The Dionne Quintuplets in Hollywood. I tried that.

Nothing. “No longer in print,” the online bookstores read, and “Unavailable,” and when I checked Project Gutenberg and Google Books, it wasn’t there either.

Why not? If Ozymandias was an archive like Cassie said, why hadn’t the books they had been digitized? What good was it to save all those books if you weren’t going to make them available to scholars?

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Maybe it was just that scholars weren’t interested in preserving The Dionne Quintuplets or Ambush in Apache Canyon. I needed to come up with a more important book—or author.

There’d been a Shakespeare—what was its name?—and a Poe and a Melville, but I needed exact titles.

I stared at the laptop screen, trying to remember the books in those first shelves by the baggage chute. But Cassie’d said those hadn’t been catalogued yet, so they probably wouldn’t have made it online either, and neither would the ones in the bookshop. Or on the stairs. It was going to have to be something in the Floods section. Or in War.

Eventually, after several hours of trying to remember, I managed to come up with half a dozen titles: Marooned on Saturn, New Theories of the Atom, Visitations from Beyond the Veil, Tommy Toad’s Birthday Surprise, Dirigibles: Our Future, and Noah’s Ark on Ararat, the one that had been rescued from the Yancey Creek Carnegie Library flood.

But I didn’t have any luck with them either, and when I googled Following in the Master’s Footsteps, it didn’t bring up anything at all, not even a dash on Amazon.

Jesus, the WMNH interview guy was right, I thought. Things do disappear into the ether.

I needed the name of a book that would be listed more than one place, one whose endangered state would cause an outcry, and not The Vagabond Boys in Bryce Canyon, whose name I’d just remembered. Its demise would hardly have been seen as a literary crisis.

What about those books Ozymandias’s had rescued from the Great Fire of London? What had been their names? It didn’t matter. I could google “St. Paul’s f ire books,” and find them that way.

I did. It brought up a bunch of articles about the London Blitz and a bookstore fire in St. Paul, Minnesota. I googled “St. Paul’s fire 1667 books” instead. And stared at the screen.

“Thousands of books had been stored for safekeeping in St. Paul’s,” the screen read. “Attempts were made to direct the fire away from it, but they proved useless.

The roof caught fire, and within hours the church lay in ashes.”

“That’s not true,” I said to my laptop. “St. Paul’s didn’t burn down. It’s still there.

They must be talking about some other church,” and looked up, “History of St. Paul’s Cathedral.”

I’d been right. St. Paul’s, with its famous dome, hadn’t burned down. But this wasn’t that St. Paul’s. It was its predecessor, the thirteenth century wood-and-stone cathedral Christopher Wren had been hired to rebuild. After the Great Fire of London burned the first one down.

“As the f lames approached, booksellers and publishers from the surrounding streets had stored their inventories in St. Paul’s in an attempt to keep them safe,”

the screen read, “but the effort proved fruitless as their books perished along with the cathedral.”

They didn’t all perish, I thought. At least a few of them survived, and clicked on London: A Compleat History to see if it listed the titles. “The books had been stored in the safest area possible, the crypt,” it said, “but as the fire progressed, the lead of the roof melted and ran down between the cathedral’s building stones, and the roof itself collapsed through the crypt’s roof.”

“Just like Wheeler Field,” I murmured, and clicked on Moseby’s A Full History of the Great Fire.

It read, “Tens of thousands of books were destroyed, including Sir William Dugdale’s Originales Judiciales, The History of Embanking and Draining, Sir Thomas 194

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Urquhart’s The Jewel, and every copy of the just-published The Carolies by John Ogilbie.”

“Not every one,” I said.

I read on. “The air in the crypt had been superheated by the surrounding flames, and when the roof collapsed, it ignited in a fireball that instantly incinerated all the volumes stored there for safekeeping.”

“Then how did they get that copy of The Carolies out?” I said.

They didn’t, I thought, a sick feeling settling in my gut. That’s why Cassie wasn’t worried about flooding. And why she’d given me that pitying look when I’d said I’d have to find my copy of Ambush in Apache Canyon and read it again.

But that’s impossible. They have to have saved it, I thought, and googled “Lewis Carroll’s diaries.”

A whole page of sites came up, and I felt a rush of relief. “There, you see?” I said, and clicked on the first one. “Charles Dodgson’s personal diaries, kept by him from 1855 on,” it read. “Only Volumes 2, 4, 5, and 8-12 remain in existence. Volumes 1, 3, 6, and 7 and several additional pages were burned by his family after his death.”

The sick feeling was back. I hastily called up the next site. “Lost Literary Treasures,” it was headed, and under that it said, “The following books and manuscripts are known to have been written, but no longer exist.” It listed Richard Crookback and Cardenio and Gibbon’s History of the Liberty of the Swiss.

“No,” I said, and googled Sylvia Plath and scrolled through her bibliography, looking for the title I’d seen.

Double Exposure. That was it. Or Double Take. Nobody knew for sure—because it had been destroyed, too, either by Sylvia or her husband. They weren’t sure about that.

But they were sure it was gone. “No copy of the book is known to remain in existence.”

No.

I googled the Yancey Creek Library Flood. “Due to the swiftness of the rising waters,”

the local newspaper account said, “librarians were unable to save any of the library’s contents, including the library’s extensive, irreplaceable genealogical records.”

They couldn’t save Noah’s Ark on Ararat either, I thought, looking at the photo that accompanied the article. It showed the building completely submerged, only the roof and the word “Carnegie” showing above water.

Below it was a second picture, taken a week later, of a front loader dredging up a scoopful of disgusting-looking muck that had once been books and was now a muddy, foul-smelling glop, and preparing to dump it in a giant trash bin.

Because there was no way to salvage those books. Just like there was no way to re-store the moldy, rat-feces-covered volumes in those hoarders’ houses or put back together the ones blown up by bombs or burned to ashes.

And that was why there hadn’t been any smell of smoke in the Fires section, and no sprinkler system, no listings on AbeBooks or BookFinder or Alibris. There weren’t any books to list.

It explained everything—why Melville’s The Isle of the Cross was there and not Moby Dick—which there were tons of copies of—why Cassie hated libraries so much, why so many of the books were old. Cassie was right. Time was the biggest enemy of books. Over the years, copy after copy would fall prey to wars and weather, to bookworms and bookburnings and fraying bindings, disintegrating paper, careless children, till at last there was only one left in some college library or old lady’s attic, and when she died or the library needed to make room for more banks of computers, it succumbed, too. And came tumbling down the baggage chute into Ozymandias’s.

Ozymandias’s wasn’t a book preserve—it was a morgue, and the books were shelved not by the disaster they’d been rescued from but by what had done them in.

And the reason I couldn’t find it was because it wasn’t there either.

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But it had to be. I was there. I was on those stairs, in those stacks. I saw Cassie take out those books and look at them.

Which means they—and Ozymandias’s—are here somewhere, and the reason I haven’t been able to f ind it is because the entrance is somehow hidden. After the f looding, a lot of storefronts were screened off by plastic sheeting and equipment pumping out the water, or the door might be blocked by hoardings or scaffolding or a parked delivery truck.

Or I somehow skipped the block when I was searching. Like I told you, all the streets look exactly the same, and now there are Christmas lights and snowflakes and Santas in all the windows, making them look even more alike.

Or maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong part of Manhattan. It occurred to me yesterday that that first day, when it started to rain and I was focused on finding shelter and/or an umbrella, I might somehow have gotten turned around without realizing it and headed back south—or east—and I should be looking over on Lex-ington Avenue or down in the Twenties. And checking out the subway stations.

When Jude called in that day, she said the station was flooded and she was going to have to find a taxi, so that means she usually comes to work by subway, and if I wait at the station entrance, at the top of the stairs, I might be able to spot her and get her to take me there so Cassie can explain everything, can tell me how The Carolies was miraculously saved from the Great Fire, how Ogilbie’s publisher snatched it up as he fled, and how Noah’s Ark on Ararat had been checked out when the flood hit the Yancey Creek Public Library and a robot submersible brought up The Plight of the Vicar’s Daughter and A Brief History of Ocean Travel from the Titanic. And my copy of Ambush in Apache Canyon is safely in my mother’s basement—even though when I called her she said she’d donated all my old books to her church rummage sale after I graduated.

Cassie can tell me she’s wrong, that Ambush in Apache Canyon wasn’t sent to the sale, that she missed it because it was hidden in among a bunch of old videotapes and thirty-five-millimeter slides. Just like Ozymandias’s is hidden in among the cleaners and pizzerias and souvenir shops.All I have to do is find the subway station and Jude.

Or that lobby where I came up. Or the recessed doorway of the bookshop itself.

I know it’s here someplace. Because if it isn’t, all those books I saw (and who knows how many since then? I just read on my phone about a famous bookstore in Seattle closing) have vanished.

And everything I said about our only allowing things we don’t need to disappear was a gigantic lie. There’s no decision-making in the process. It’s all completely accidental—a conf lagration here, a teething puppy there, leaky pipes and wars and peanut butter and bookworms and bookburnings and book-culling and being left out in the rain.

Aided by our well-meaning attempts to stop the slaughter by microfilming them and digitizing them and parking them all together in the middle of the field. And assuming there are plenty of copies around, and that sending one more to the landfill won’t matter. Till all that’s left is a dash on Amazon and sometimes not even that.

And we don’t even know they’re gone. At least when the Library of Alexandria burned, we knew it. Here, it’s happening in front of our very eyes, and we can’t even see it. Till we try to find a copy of a book we loved as a kid. Or accidentally stumble into Ozymandias’s.

Brooke just called again, demanding to know why I hadn’t shown up to my meeting with Random House. “This is the fifth time I’ve rescheduled it,” she said. “I can’t keep covering for you like this. What’s your excuse this time? And don’t tell me research. What are you really doing? I called your hotel and they told me you’d checked out three weeks ago. Have you gotten involved with someone?”

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Yes, I thought, scanning the faces coming along the street for Jude’s, for Cassie’s.

“You can do whatever you want with your love life, but this is your career we’re talking about. And mine. And you’re destroying both of them,” Brooke said, but she sounded more concerned than angry. “Are you okay?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

They’re gone, I thought. All those books. Double Exposure and Ambush in Apache Canyon, Raleigh and Lewis Carroll and Tommy Toad and The Daring Debutante, and thousands, millions of others. And more of them disappear every day, tumbling down that chute from fires and hoarders’ houses and book sales, so fast that even working extra hours and calling in Jude and Thaddeus and Rita and everybody else Cassie can think of to help, there’s no way they’ll be able to keep up with the deluge.

“I said, are you okay?” Brooke repeated. “I’m worried about you. Have you gotten in some kind of trouble? Where are you?”

“I don’t know,” I said, looking vaguely around at the delis and hoardings and souvenir shops surrounding me. “All the streets look alike.”

There was a silence, and then she said, sounding very calm, “Listen, I want you to find a taxi and tell them to take you to my office. I’ll pay for it. I’ll be waiting for you outside on the sidewalk, and we’ll work this all out, whatever it is. Just find a taxi and come here to me. Okay?”

“Yes,” I said, but I can’t. I have to find Ozymandias’s first. It’s here someplace, on one of these endless, look-alike streets. It has to be.

Because otherwise all those endless shelves of books—all those histories and plays and adventures and sentimental novels and textbooks and teen star biographies are gone. And whatever fascinating or affecting or profound things were in them are as lost to us as that vanished kingdom of Ozymandias’s. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair indeed.

And I know, I know, most of them were junk, and nobody’s going to miss The Vagabond Boys or Chickens is Chickens. But what about Cardenio and Edgar Allan Poe’s story and The Carolies and Ambush in Apache Canyon? And even The Dionne Quintuplets in Hollywood might have had something important to say to us.

But now we’ll never know. Because, in spite of what I told the interview guy on WMNH, in spite of what I believed, there isn’t any way to get them back. They are, as I so carelessly, so callously, put it, gone for good. And we let them go.

But that’s too terrible a thought to even contemplate. We can’t just have let them all disappear without a trace like that, can we?

Surely not. Which means there’s some other explanation for all this, and the books are just endangered and there’s still time to save them. I just have to find Ozymandias. It’s here somewhere, on one of these goddamn look-alike streets. It has to be. ❍

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and “The Final Commandment: Trey’s Story”; new author S.

Qiouyi Lu examines the stark choices facing a single parent and the sacrifices that may be made in “Mother Tongues”; Robert R.

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ON BOOKS

Peter Heck

THE PEOPLE’S POLICE

Even wheeler-dealer J.B. Lafitte discov-

By Norman Spinrad
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prostitution aren’t sufficient to pay the

ISBN: 978-0-7653-8427-0
mortgages on his properties—and he’s got
pinrad is in top form with this near-
connections that reach far into Louisiana
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that has felt the brunt of global warm-

Meanwhile, MaryLou has been taking

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fines the Crescent City.

it—and connects with some real believers

We see the story through three charac-
who let her take part in one of their cere-
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monies. Out of nowhere, she finds herself
has a finger in almost every sleazy deal
being taken over by Erzuli, one of the loas
that goes on in the city. Luke Martin came
or ruling spirits of the voodoo pantheon.

from gang territory out on the half-

Erzuli has her own ambitions, and she’s
drowned fringes of the city; when he fig-
decided MaryLou is a convenient vehicle
ured out that the cops are the ultimate
to get her where she wants to go.

street gang, he joined up. And then there’s

Luke and MaryLou have unwittingly

MaryLou Boudreau, a.k.a. Mama Legba,
put themselves on paths that will shake up
who made the transition from street per-
the whole power structure of New Orleans
former to TV stardom as the Voodoo
and Louisiana. Those paths inevitably in-

Queen of Louisiana.

tersect, as both become more powerful and

The story’s key conflict arises from su-
the stakes grow higher. The foreclosure cri-
per-deflation—to the point that prices of
sis continues, and Luke’s stake in it contin-
most consumer goods are ridiculously
ues to grow, particularly when it becomes a
low. Great as this sounds, it has two un-
statewide issue in a gubernatorial election.

fortunate consequences. Most people’s

And of course, J.B.’s maneuvers—not all of
salaries have been adjusted downward,
which come out exactly as planned—have
so they’re getting equivalent purchasing
a good deal to do with the outcome.

power to what their old salary would

This is vintage Spinrad, with over-the-
have bought. But some things have not
top characters, underhanded politics, sex
been adjusted—specifically, mortgages.

and drugs, and plenty of juicy New Or-

Luke figures this out when he’s assigned
leans local color, all presented in typical
to foreclose on a house—his own. Out-
high-energy style. Totally recommended.

raged by the request, he goes to the po-
lice union, which backs him, declaring it

GILDED CAGE
will no longer serve foreclosure notices

By Vic James
on its members.

Del Rey, $26.00 (hc)

But by putting himself forward, even

ISBN: 978-0-425-28415-5
on a selfish motive, Luke has made him-

This debut novel is a British alternate-
self a symbol of the fight against the ul-
world fantasy with young protagonists,
tra-rich who are the beneficiaries of the
set in a tough class-conscious society
super-deflation crisis. This fight is bound
where magic is the property of a small
to grow beyond the comparatively privi-
core of aristocrats—the Equals.

leged ranks of the police force.

This world’s history diverges from

199

November/December 2017
ours in the 1600s, when a powerful ma-
self working as a secretary for the Jar-
gician overthrew the British monarchy
dines—a position that exposes her to
and established the Equals as the true
some of the family’s secrets. Her ten-year-
rulers of the land. Among their perks is
old sister, Daisy, is given the job of baby-
a requirement that all commoners spend
sitting Libby, Gavar’s daughter with a
a ten-year term in unpaid servitude to
slave girl who was killed trying to escape
the Equals—or the “aristos,” as the sub-
the estate. And on the aristos’ side, a ma-
jugated classes call them.

jor political struggle is building up, with a

The novel follows the career of two
scheduled vote on a measure to cede some
families—the Hadleys, who sign on to
of their powers. Silyen is studying ancient
spend their slavedays with the Jardines,
magic in hopes of helping a family mem-
the most powerful of all Equal families. It
ber recover from a magical disaster that
seems like a good plan—both the parents
has left her in a coma. Each of them has
and the oldest daughter, Abi, who’s just
their own agenda, and alliances shift as
about to enter university, have skills that
each finds a temporary advantage. And of
figure to exempt them from the most me-
course, events outside the closed enclave
nial or dangerous jobs. Except, when the
of Kyneston have a momentum of their
day comes for them to leave home and
own—some pointing toward the possibili-
take on their assignments, the Hadleys
ty of change, though it looks as if the deck
learn there’s no place for their son Luke
is stacked against it.

at the Jardine estate in Kyneston. He’s to

The author also gives the reader a look
be sent to Millmoor, a notoriously brutal
beyond the here and now, with glimpses
manufacturing town that lives up to
of the history of the realm and how the

William Blake’s image of “dark Satanic
rise of magic has affected other English-
mills.”

speaking countries. The overall effect is

Meanwhile, on the Aristo side, the sto-
somewhere between “Harry Potter” with-
ry focuses on the Jardine family’s three
out the boarding school and “Hunger
sons: Gavar, Jenner, and Silyen. Gavar,

Games” without the hunting. It probably
the eldest, is being groomed to take over
does a better job of preparing young
the house’s leading role in the nation’s
readers for the real world of 2017 and be-
politics, though he finds it hard to take
yond than either of those very popular
seriously anything but his own plea-
series.

sures—which are those you’d expect of a

As the book ends, it’s clear there’s a se-
spoiled aristocrat. Jenner, the middle son,
quel on the horizon. That’s excellent
is without magical power—a crippling
news; I’ll be looking forward to it eagerly.

lack, in this world. As a result, he is in
many ways the most human of the fami-

IN CALABRIA
ly. Silyen, for his part, appears to have

By Peter S. Beagle
one of the most powerful magical gifts

Tachyon, $19.95 (hc)

ever seen—and an interest in using it in

ISBN: 978-1-61696-248-7
unprecedented ways.

Beagle, whose The Last Unicorn is a

The plot shifts back and forth between
fantasy classic, returns to the theme of

Kyneston and Millmoor, where Luke
that book with a story of a rough Italian
takes his share of lumps before figuring
farmer who wakes one morning to find
out how to fit in. Eventually he learns
that a unicorn has made her home on his
there is a resistance movement among
land.

the slaves—one that can make good use

Claudio Bianchi is a loner. He tends
of a young boy willing to take a few
his vineyard and his animals, and writes
risks. And while the aristos appear to
the occasional poem—though he keeps
have all the power, they can’t be every-
that to himself. His only regular contact
where all the time.

is the mailman, Romano, who likes to

Meanwhile at Kyneston, Abi finds her-
chat—much to Claudio’s annoyance.

200

Peter Heck

Asimov’s

Claudio hates change, and Romano re-
others. The final elements of the plot are
minds him of the way things are chang-
driven by Claudio’s attempts to regain his
ing, especially when he talks about his
old privacy while protecting the unicorn
younger sister Giovanna, whom Claudio
from the outside world.

thinks of as a child, growing up and

Readers who remember his earlier
starting to drive. Besides, Romano never
book will be glad to know that Beagle
brings any mail worth reading—only
has found a way to tell another unicorn
useless advertisements.

tale, one with its own elements of poetry

Claudio’s world seems likely to go on in
and magic, in a setting that combines a
much the same manner, until one frosty
pastoral charm and intrusive modernity.

morning, he looks out the kitchen win-

Claudio, despite appearing a bit of a cur-
dow and sees the unicorn in his vineyard,
mudgeon at first, grows into someone
nibbling on weeds. When it notices him,
readers will find sympathetic, and the
it disappears—but when he walks out to
rest of the cast is nicely observed and
where it was, hoof prints remain to show
well drawn. A charming, beautifully
it was no hallucination. The unicorn fre-
written short novel—don’t miss it.

quently returns, and Claudio’s life is
firmly set in its new direction. Perhaps

THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS
not surprisingly, it is an inspiration to

By China Miéville
him: his poetry takes on a new vigor, and

Del Rey, $25.00 (hc)

he begins looking forward to its visits. All

ISBN: 978-0-345-54400-1
the farm animals seem to be enchanted

Here’s an alternate history with a
by the unicorn, as well. As a solitary man

World War II setting—except this one
is likely to do, he finds himself talking to
takes place in a world where the visions
the unicorn. It seems to be listening—
of the surrealist artists of the 1920s
though of course, it never replies. And
through the late forties have broken out
then he realizes that the unicorn is preg-
of their paintings and into reality.

nant and has chosen his farm as the

The story is broken into two alternat-
place to give birth to her young.

ing segments, one set in Marseilles in

But there’s another surprise to come.

1941, the other in Paris in 1950. In both

The mailman decides to let his sister deliv-
segments, France is occupied by the Ger-
er the mail every so often, and of course,
mans. Marseilles is recognizably set in
on her first day on the route, she finds
our own world—a city where plots are

Claudio with the unicorn. She immediate-
hatched, though this early in the war,
ly recognizes that it is pregnant, and now
the occupation lies a bit lighter than in
she and Claudio have a secret in common.

other areas.

She agrees not to tell anyone, on condition

But in the later segment, the Paris of
that he reads her one of the poems her

1950 is a war zone with groups of French
brother is convinced the old farmer is
resistance fighters taking on the Ger-
writing—even though Claudio has never
mans, while both sides dodge manifs:

admitted it. And gradually, the relation-
strange creatures that could only have
ship between the two of them grows into
come from a surrealist’s imagination. The
something else.

focus is on a young Frenchman named

Of course, word somehow gets out, and

Thibaut, the surviving member of a resis-
much of the book involves Claudio deal-
tance group called Main à plume.

ing with the consequences of the aston-

We meet Thibaut as he watches the in-
ishing news. With the unicorn refusing to
teractions between the German invaders
appear when strangers are on the farm,
and the manifs. Miéville gives us a look
he can get away with the claim that the
back at the “S-blast,” the moment at
story is untrue—everybody knows there’s
which Paris was transformed from a nor-
no such animal. But some of the unwel-
mal city (despite being occupied by the
come visitors are more persistent than

Nazis) to one where the city becomes

On Books

201

November/December 2017

“populated by its own unpretty imagin-
plot to the original artwork that inspired
ings.” A few quick scenes are enough to
them. If you’ve always been intrigued by
establish the situation—a self-driving
the surrealist movement, this could serve
motorcycle scattering German troops, a
as a quick and enjoyable route to learning
tendril of vegetation snatching Messer-
more about the artists and their work. Or
schmitts out of the sky.

plunge right in and read it for the sophis-

Thibaut knows the surrealist school
ticated and complex fantasy it is.

from growing up idolizing its painters,
seeing it as a liberation movement. Now,

THE GOLDEN GATE
with enemy soldiers occupying Paris, “lib-

By Robert Buettner
eration” means something far more con-

Baen, $25.00 (hc)

crete to him—even though he is fighting

ISBN: 978-1-4767-8190-7
a one-man battle for his city. And then, a

Here’s a near-future mystery that
woman joins him—a photographer who
walks the line between SF and tech-
says she has come to record what has be-
nothriller, set in San Francisco. It begins
come of Paris. Her name is Sam, and she
with a murder on the Golden Gate
appears to know almost as much as Thi-

Bridge. Manuel Colibri, the world’s rich-
baut about the surrealists.

est man, falls victim to a car bomb that

The scene jumps to Marseille, where
literally blows him off the bridge.

two men meet in a café. One, Vernon Fry,

Two people investigate: tech journalist
says he’s an American trying to find a way

Kate Boyle and Iraq war veteran Ben
to travel farther into Europe. The other,

Shepard. Ben more or less stumbles into

Jack Parsons, has been living in the city
the investigation—he’s a go-fer for a new-
long enough to make the acquaintance of
ly appointed Secretary of National Secu-
several surrealists—he claims to be par-
rity, who’s been sent to look into the possi-
ticular friends with Aleister Crowley—
ble terrorist implications of the murder.

but, as we learn, he has a jury-rigged ma-

When the suspect dies in the explosion of
chine that can “unfold the world.” While
his bomb lab, the secretary decides to go
the exact meaning of that is unclear, it’s
back to Washington to stoke his political
not hard to understand that it’ll eventual-
ambitions, and Ben stays behind to mop
ly have something to do with what’s going
up the details—in particular, to locate
on in Paris.

Colibri’s body.

Miéville juggles the two time streams

Meanwhile, Kate has returned to San
for several chapters, with events in Thi-

Francisco to look in on her widowed fa-
baut’s Paris taking up most of the space.

ther, a tough lawyer who’s letting his

The crisis grows, as the German occupiers
grief—and the Scotch—get the upper
attempt to make some final push, and the
hand. One of his old clients has asked
surrealist manifs take on more energy in
him to look into Colibri’s murder, so Kate
response. The situation doesn’t become
decides to put her journalistic skills to
any less strange with familiarity—the au-
work and help him find out what’s what.

thor manages to find unexpected plot

As it turns out, there’s suspicion that
twists to throw the reader’s expectations

Colibri’s research into life extension made
off the mark. That may make the novel
him a target. If, as he suggested, human
uncomfortable for some readers; this is by
life could be extended indefinitely, what
no means a stock fantasy world, and the
becomes of the religions that promise
surrealists aren’t an easy group to use as
their adherents life after death? Rumor
the framework for a coherent plot. But
has it that Colibri made the Catholic

Miéville makes it work, and readers who

Church the sole owner of his company in
stick with the story will find it rewarding.

the event of his death—could the Church

The book is illustrated with samples of
have decided to kill two birds with one
the art Miéville refers to, and it includes
stone?

notes linking the various manifs in the

At first, Kate and Ben follow leads

202

Peter Heck

Asimov’s
separately—Ben on a boat on San Fran-
already there. The title of the chapter—
cisco Bay, trying to find whatever’s left of

“Pair of Docs”—should give the reader

Colibri’s car, and possibly his remains, so
ample notice of the jesting tone much of
the case can be put to bed; Kate inter-
the narrative take as Kimmel plays with
viewing the victim’s acquaintances.

the twists of probability and causality in-

When they finally connect up, neither
volved in time travel.

makes a good first impression, but they

The story alternates between the re-
do make a good team. Eventually, they
porter—who’s becoming less and less
stumble on a clue—a note from Colibri
sure he knows how to write his article
that leads them on a tour of some of San
but more and more convinced that the

Francisco’s museums and libraries—at
professor’s the real thing—and Price’s
each of which is an artifact donated by
adventures as he visits different eras in
the missing billionaire. After the protago-
hopes of finding out where the original
nists find them, Buettner provides a
time machine came from. As it turns out,
chapter detailing the origins of each—
he didn’t actually invent it; his future
and the astute reader will begin to recog-
self gave it to him, and it appears to be
nize a deeper reality behind the surface
based on theoretical papers from an ear-
of Colibri’s disappearance. And yes, there
lier professor whom he then decides to
is a real SF element, and it is crucial to
visit. That leads him to . . . well, we don’t
the story as a whole.

want to give away the whole story, do

The Golden Gate is an entertaining SF
we? Suffice it to say that the complica-
mystery/thriller with a fair quota of
tions and temporal paradoxes pile up
twists and red herrings, and a good sense
steadily, always with a humorous edge to
of pace. Add to that a nicely realized San
them. Oh yes, there’s a love story in the

Francisco setting—and it may give read-
mix, as well—with its own time travel
ers a number of ideas about less-familiar
twists and turns.

places to visit on their next trip to the city.

In addition to the plot, Kimmel mixes
in some interesting speculations on the

TIME ON MY HANDS
ethics of time travel—for example, the

My Misadventures in Time Travel
whole question of altering history by de-

By Daniel M. Kimmel
liberately changing some action in the

Fantastic Books, $14.99 (tp)

past, or the problem of meeting an earli-

ISBN: 978-1-5154-0052-3
er (or later) version of yourself during

Kimmel offers an engaging, often hu-
your travels. His solutions are original,
morous time-travel story that manages
at least to this reader, and reasonably
to hit most of the expected themes of the
consistent within the world of the story.

genre while retaining a fresh feeling.

This one’s a fun read, with fresh takes

Set in Rochester, New York, the story
on classic SF material and interesting re-
begins with a young newspaper reporter,
minders of some of the changes that have

Max Miller, assigned to interview Profes-
taken place in a comparatively short pe-
sor Wilford Price, who claims to have in-
riod of history,
vented a time machine. The journalist is

You may not find Time on My Hands
looking to get in and out of the interview
at a local bookseller, but you can order
with as little wasted time as possible. Af-
it directly from the publisher at www.

ter all, the story can’t be true—and he

FantasticBooks.biz or from most online
can only end up looking foolish if he takes
booksellers. You won’t regret it.

it too seriously.

But Max isn’t going to get off the hook

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF
that easily. The professor drags him into

LANGDON ST. IVES
the story with the first of a series of anec-

By James P. Blaylock
dotes—this one about walking into his of-

Subterranean, $40 (hc)

fice at the university and finding himself

ISBN: 978-1-59606-782-0

On Books

203

November/December 2017

Fans of steampunk will welcome this
various Victorian adventures, popular
collection from one of the inventors of
movies, and other bits of lore that will
the subgenre, featuring the intrepid Vic-
provide additional entertainment to read-
torian adventurer St. Ives.

ers who recognize the originals. All in all,

Told by the adventurer’s sidekick Jack
this is great fun for steampunk fans, as

Owlesby, the stories generally begin in
well as those who just enjoy a well-told
the Half Toad, a London inn run by an
adventure yarn.

ex-sailor who with his wife offers sur-

One of the stories published here, “The
prisingly good food and drink. Thence

Ring of Stones,” appeared previously as
they launch out into adventures, several
a stand-alone from Subterranean. But
of which involve Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, a
there’s enough more in this volume—es-
mad scientist of sweeping ambition.

pecially the stylish (and plentiful) black

Blaylock conjures up a suitably enter-
and white illustrations by J.K. Potter—
taining set of inventions for Narbondo to
to make the book well worth the deluxe
deploy against the protagonists: an elec-
hardcover price.

tric submarine and a ray that induces
madness are just the first two. To combat

TRAVELER OF WORLDS

Narbondo’s schemes, St. Ives and his

Conversations with
companions travel from the seamy pubs

Robert Silverberg
along the London docks to the quick-

By Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
sands of Morecambe Bay and ride the

Fairwood Press, $16.99 (tp)

railroad to the North of England and

ISBN: 978-1-933846-63-7
then back to a hidden cave near Dover,

Here’s a collection of interviews with
just in time to thwart Narbondo’s scheme
one of the giants of the field, looking
to Rule the World.

back over his life and career.

But that’s not all—in one adventure, St.

Zinos-Amaro has spent some twenty

Ives and his companions take on a
years studying Silverberg’s work, getting
strange cult that sweeps through London,
to know him, and eventually even collab-
sending its devotees down the Thames in
orating on a novel with him. This has
barrels. Later, St. Ives and friends set off
created a level of trust between the two
on a voyage to a Caribbean island to find
that resulted in the remarkably frank
a giant pearl, pursued by pirates in search
and detailed conversations that make up
of the same treasure, and come up against
this book.

strange alien gods who jealously protect

The book is divided into chapters, each
it. Still another adventure takes the intre-
on a specific subject—some biographical,
pid explorer to a world above the clouds,
some literary, all infused with Silver-
in which he meets another scientist of du-
berg’s urbane observations on whatever
bious sanity and gets a look into his own
topic comes to the fore. Zinos-Amaro
future.

does a good job feeding him questions,

Most of the stories are told from Jack’s
raising issues that show his familiarity
point of view, and he is an amiable “Wat-
with his subject’s interests and accom-
son,” loyal and willing to pitch in as re-
plishments. As a result, the book offers a
quired, whether in a fight or taking the
fascinating insight into the course of sci-
controls of an unfamiliar machine—and
ence fiction, its readers and creators, and
just a step behind St. Ives when it comes
the world at large,
to figuring things out. The other charac-

In the first chapter, “The Vividness of
ters are stock Victorian types as well. And

Landscape,” Silverberg talks about his

Blaylock has a nice touch with the period
travels, which have covered much of the
style, not always an easy thing for a mod-
world. We hear about museums all over
ern writer to pull off without coming
the earth, the different artifacts Silver-
across as either stodgy or presumptuous.

berg has acquired—and we get a good

All through, Blaylock drops in echoes of
sense of Silverberg’s conversational voice,

204

Peter Heck

Asimov’s
which is one of the prime attractions
by a commercial airline pilot in 1947.

here. The next chapter, “Aesthetics,”

Other sightings followed, and soon it was
moves into questions of artistic taste—
all over the newspapers, not just in the
covering a range from landscape to music

U.S. but also worldwide.

to painting to the movies—and, of course,

Sensationalist editor Ray Palmer,
the art of storytelling. Further chapters
whose Amazing Stories featured the infa-
touch on the centrality of wonder in sci-
mous fact-and-fantasy-blurring “Shaver
ence fiction, the importance of libraries,

Mystery” stories in the 1940s, quickly
and Silverberg’s own writing career. He
sized up the saucer sightings as a hot
began publishing stories in the early
new angle he could use to boost circula-

1950s. A series of questions submitted by
tion. Predictably, the saucer craze picked

Zinos-Alvaro’s friends on Facebook covers
up all sorts of dubious elements, many of
several bases untouched elsewhere in the
which smelled strongly of hoaxery. That
volume, and the concluding chapter gives
didn’t bother Palmer.

Silverberg’s reflections on reaching the

Anyone who’s dipped into the flying
age of eighty-five.

saucer literature knows just how bizarre

Along the way, there are comments on
it can get, and Womack has dug up some

Silverberg’s fellow writers, his editors,
juicy specimens. SF readers with a sense
and on a good number of his novels or
of history will already be familiar with
stories. It’s an absolute treat for anyone
some of them. Along with Palmer, a few
who’s enjoyed Silverberg’s fiction, or his
other names with SF connections show
columns in this magazine. An introduc-
up in the account—Otto Binder, a minor
tion by Gardner Dozois and a reminis-
star of the pulp era, probably best known
cence of traveling with Silverberg by his
for scripting “Captain Marvel” comics,
wife, Karen Haber, are nice additions to
was co-author of Mankind—Child of the
the volume.

Stars, which earned a cover blurb from

By chance, I happened recently to pick
none other than Erich Von Daniken. And
up Silverberg’s 1987 anthology, Worlds of
most readers can probably think of a few

Wonder, which includes an autobiographi-
spaceships from SF film or TV shows
cal sketch in addition to his observations
that adopted the general saucer shape.

on the art of writing SF. It adds an inter-

But the woo-woo elements of the saucer
esting perspective to some of the autobio-
craze very quickly eroded any interest
graphical comments in Traveler of Worlds.

most serious SF fans might have had in

It’s worth finding a copy—especially in
it, other than as a mass phenomenon that
conjunction with Alvaro’s portrait of Sil-
superficially—and very uncritically—in-
verberg—one of the most illustrious writ-
corporated such SF themes as alien visi-
ers of his generation.

tations and FTL travel. The notion that
saucer people had come to Earth to warn

FLYING SAUCERS ARE REAL!

humanity of some dire future—the exact

The UFO Library of Jack Womack
nature of the threat varied from one ac-

By Jack Womack
count to another—was stale for SF read-

Anthology Editions, $40.00 (tp)

ers even by the early fifties, despite its ap-

ISBN: 978-1-944860-00-4
pearance in a couple of now-classic films.

Here’s a look back at the boom years of

In the hands of many of its proponents,
the UFO craze as reflected in the popular
the saucer material was blended with the
press of the time, as collected (and with a
kind of dime-store mysticism that is the
few ironic asides) by Womack. Womack
stuff of cults.

chronicles the different manifestations of

Womack mostly lets the material speak
the cult with ample illustrations and
for itself, in all its multitudinous contra-
quotes from the various books and maga-
dictions. The coffee-table book is full of il-
zine articles that have appeared over the
lustrations, including a number of vin-
decades since the first recorded sighting,
tage photos that were produced as

On Books

205

November/December 2017
evidence of the reality of saucers. There
emerge from the fringes every so often.

are passages from books describing the

A bonus is an introduction by William
experiences of those who had been on

Gibson, who has a flying saucer experi-
trips aboard a saucer, or transcribing
ence from his own family to contribute.

their conversations with the spacemen.

This one isn’t for everybody, but as docu-

All in all, they’re vivid snapshots of some-
mentation of a notion that grabbed the
thing quintessentially American—and
popular mind and held onto it for a sur-
while the saucer craze has faded from
prising length of time, this is a remark-
prominence, it can be counted on to
able vein of material. ❍

206

Peter Heck

SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR
nother jam-packed schedule. Check out MileHiCon, VCon, PhilCon (where I’ll be), WindyCon, OryCon, SFContario, LosCon, ChessieCon (me again), and SMOFCon (me yet again). But don’t be afraid to try an off-trail event. Plan now for social weekends with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans.

AFor an explanation of our con(vention)s, a sample of SF folksongs, and info on fanzines and clubs, send me an SASE (self-addressed, stamped #10 [business] envelope) at 10 Hill #22-L, Newark NJ 07102. The hot line is (973) 242-5999. If a machine answers (with a list of the week’s cons), leave a message and I’ll call back on my nickel. When writing cons, send an SASE. For free listings, tell me of your con five months out. Look for me at cons behind the Filthy Pierre badge, playing a musical keyboard. —Erwin S. Strauss OCTOBER 2017

26–29—Sirens Conference. For info, write: 10 Hill St. #22-L, Newark NJ 07102. Or phone: (973) 242-5999 (10 a.m. to 10 p.m., not collect). (Web) sirensconference.org. (E-mail) info@sirensconference.org. Con will be held in: Vail CO (if city omitted, same as in address) at the Hotel Talisa (formerly Cascade Resort). Guests will include: Z. Cordova, N. K. Jemisen, V. Schwab. Women in fantasy.

27–29—MileHiCon. milehicon.org. Hyatt Tech Center, Denver CO. Eric Flint (creator of the “1632” saga), artist Jane Liodskold.

27–29—HonorCon. honorcon.org. Hilton North Midtown, Raleigh NC. Larry Corriea. David Weber’s “Honor Harrington” series.

27–29—HallowCon. hallowcon.com. Quality Inn East Ridge, Nashville TN. SF, fantasy, and horror-themed Halloween party.

27–29—Furpocalypse. furpocalypse.org. Radisson, Cromwell CT. For fans of cartoon animals, many dressed up like them.

27–31—HanseKon. hansekon.de. Lübeck Germany. General SF, fantasy, and horror convention.

28—BristolCon. bristolcon.org. Doubletree, Bristol UK. Authors Jonathan L. Howard and Jan Williams, artist Sarah Ann Langton.

28–29—VCon. vcon.ca. Sheraton Vancouver Guildford Hotel, Surrey BC. Artist Nancie Green, fan R. Graeme Cameron.

NOVEMBER 2017

2–5—World Fantasy Con. worldfantasy.org. Wyndham Riverwalk, Austin TX. Tananarive Due, Martha Wells. Dark fantasy.

2–5—TeslaCon. teslacon.com. Marriott, West Middleton WI. Steampunk. “The Bucharest Bungle” is the theme.

3—Phreaknic. phreaknic.info. Marriott, Murfreesboro (Nashville) TN. Creative uses for technology (“hacking”).

3–5—FaerieCon. faeriecon.com. Delta Hunt Valley Inn, Hunt Valley (Baltimore) MD. Many musicians. “The Magical Life” is the theme.

3–5—ArmadaCon. armadacon.org. Future Inns, Plymouth UK. Multi-media SF, fantasy and horror.

4—Pulp Adventurecon. pulpadventure.com. Ramada Inn, Bordentown NJ. For fans of old-time pulp magazines.

10–12—PhilCon. philcon.org. Crowne Plaza, Cherry Hill NJ. Seanan McGuire (Mire Grant), musicians Bill and Brenda Sutton.

10–12—WindyCon, c/o Box 166, Crystal Lake IL 60014. windycon.org. Westin, Lombard (Chicago) IL. Rudy Rucker, Paul Taylor.

10–12—LI Who. longislanddoctorwho.com. Hyatt, Hauppague, Long Island NY. Louise Jameson, Sylvester McCoy, Michael Troughton.

10–12—OmegaCon. omegacon.org. Best Western Northwood Lodge, Siren WI. Low-key SF, fantasy and horror relax-a-con.

10–12—Crime Bake. crimebake.org. Hilton, Woburn (Boston) MA. Lisa Gardner. For fans of mystery fiction.

10–12—NovaCon, 375 Myrtle Rd., Sheffield S2 3HQ, UK. novacon.org.uk. Park Inn Hotel, Nottingham UK. Adrian Tchaikovsky.

11–12—FanatiCon. alabamafanaticon.org. Civic Center, Ozark AL. Voice actress Courtenay Taylor. Media SF, fantasy and horror.

17–19—OryCon, c/o Box 5464, Portland OR 97228. orycon.org. Red Lion Jantzen Beach. Timothy Zahn, Briana Lawrence.

17–19—SFContario, c/o 151 Gamma, Toronto ON M8W 4G3. sfcontario.ca. General SF, fantasy and horror convention.

17–19—AtomaCon. atomacon.org. Best Western Select, North Charleston SC. Keith R. A. DeCandido, Gail Z. Martin, John Hartness.

17–19—DerpyCon. derpycon.com. Hyatt, Morristown NJ. Walter Jones and David Yost, of the Power Rangers. Anime.

24–26—LosCon, c/o LASFaS, 6012 Tyrone Ave., Van Nuys CA 91401. loscon.org. LAX Marriott, Los Angeles CA. Carrie Vaughn.

24–26—ChamBanaCon, c/o Box 2908, Springfield IL 62708. chambanacon.org. Marriott. Gene Wolfe, Seanan McGuire. Relax-a-con.

24–26—ChessieCon, c/o TSFS, Box 83032, Gaithersburg MD 20883. chessiecon.org. Timonium (Baltimore) MD. Ada Palmer.

24–26—Chicago Tardis. chicagotardis.com. Westin, Lombard (Chicago) IL. Baker, Davison, McCoy, Aldred, Briggs. Doctor Who.

30–Dec. 1—MidWest FurFest. furfest.org. Hyatt O’Hare, Rosemont (Chicago) IL. For fans of cartoon animals.

DECEMBER 2017

1–3—SMOFCon. mcfi.org. Back Bay Hilton, Boston MA. Where con organizers meet to talk shop; the hot stove league of con running.

AUGUST 2018

16–20—WorldCon 76, Box 61363, Sunnyvale CA 94088. worldcon76.org. San Jose CA. Spider Robinson. WorldCon for 2018. $190.